My SSD kicked the bucket, thankfully though, I exported all my builds to go in BeamNG and had that folder backed up. That being said I read over and over **AppData\Local\AutomationGame\Saved\UserData\CarSaveImport and slap the .car file in there to recover it. This never works, though I’ve not owned either game very long at all, I am fairly tech savvy and know that my various 55.1 MB++ cars is not in the 214k .car file… so what is the actual way to restore cars once exported from the current build to their zip form back into the current build again? also I believe I am 4.27 OpenBeta if that makes any difference, thank you muchly for any help 
Your Beam exports should be .zip files. Inside each of those archives, there will be a “vehicles” folder, which will contain one folder. Inside this folder, you should see a .car file somewhere, with a name based on the car’s model and trim name - for instance, one of my exports has a .car named “model_81___trim_89.car”. Put that .car file in the CarSaveImport folder and it should work.