In blender, my model has around 172,000 something verts, I am interesting in knowing how to lower the amount of verts without absolutely demolishing the whole thing

The very first you could do is remove the rims and wheels (you can later import the rims separately). Keep the suspension, because you'll need to map it later. After that, you could try these two methods in Blender to lower the points and triangles.

Method 1 (un-subdivide) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BATG3b1ZFG4
Method 2 (decimate) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrD71-wXrIA

Overall, you could try to find the most detailed parts and recreate them. Sometimes dashboards, rims, tires, steering wheels, and small details like that have the most vertices. You could check if there are invisible parts inside the vehicle, which nobody will see. You can delete them as well.

Also, models sometimes contain "doubles" - more vertices in the same position. In Blender you can join vertices using "merge vertices by distance" in the edit mode.