Very cool Story. Most people don't know how complicated color really is. Everything you see on most kind of usual displays like Phones, Pads, Laptops, TVs, PC Monitors is uncalibrated and simply cannot be trusted. Virtually rendered in 3D tools like Keyshot or VRED (at Ford) comes closer but requires an artist that knows how to work with a calibrated color workflow (few do, most don't like it because it limits creativity and mostly images are tweaked to show a more desirable car that convinces people to like and buy it). Still a calibrated display required. But this only works for unicolor paints. For metallic or flipflop paints there is no perfect digital representation. I once had the opportunity to listen to talk of a researcher describing how a potential digital representation would look like, way too expensive to compute and gobs of data. Everything happens at the micro level ( shapes of the pigments, and how many of them and how thick that layer of metallic is, it's color and the color of the clear coat and the level of orange peel)
And in the end there is the mixing process of the color and the skills of the painting artist.
So much that could go wrong.
Congrats that the result you got is so close to what you were hoping for. I really like it.