Actually, you should try the internal raytracer to actually make some real reflections on an object..

Actually, unpainted shiny metals tend to have fairly low diffuse light contribution, what with almost all the light reflecting from the half-angle (specular direction).
So, put the specular level high, and diffuse level low; use a reflection map or raytracing for increased realism, as others suggested.

-Nik

If you want to use raytracing features in Blender, you don't have to implement it yourself, just use it; see Yafray raytracer for Blender.

If you do want to make your own raytracer, the concept is quite simple: for each screen fragment (or pixel in layman's terms) calculate a vector (ray) from eyepoint thru the said fragment and check all the collisions between that vector and the scene geometry.
If the vector does collide with some geometry, save the resulting color (which is obtained from your material/lighting interaction procedure), and if the material is "reflective" at all, continue to trace the ray reflected from it's collision point recursively until some treshold is met (for example, max reflections per ray is very common).
Basically, that's it.

Equipped with this information, it is quite easy to add, for example, shadows, refraction, texturing, and what not

-Nik

[edited by - Nik02 on April 7, 2004 11:41:01 AM]