Based on all this input I did a bit more tweaking. I got pretty noisy pictures for my day setting unless I reduced the sharpness to something like 5 (default is 50). It appears the camera didn't get enough light. Initially, I had the shutter fixed at 0.25ms (1/4000s). With sharpness set at 40 this gave me the image in ShutterFixed0.25ms.png.
I then set the shutter to variable from 0 to 2ms (1/500s). The 1/500s is a bit low based on recommendations from here which are more in the 1/1000 to 1/4000 range for day time. I am not sure why I had to allow up to 1/500s but this now give the image shown in Shutter0to2ms.png which is a big improvement.
I then played with the bitrate. I know I am not supposed to use VBR because by the time the bit allocation has changed for where a car passes it will be too late. But I tried it anyways just for reference. So here is the same non-moving car with VBR quality 6 at up to 8192kb/s.
And here at CBR with 8192kb/s. It's slightly better but not much. But again, this is for a non-moving car.
I then changed it to CBR 12288kb/s. This did yield some significant improvement. If I make this change to all my cams it will reduce the hours I can save by 1/3 which isn't great. I thought most people use 8192kb/s so maybe I am still doing something wrong that I get this washed out area at 8192kb/s.
Things are getting worse when it rains as all those raindrops add a lot of movement. The image below is also at CBR 12288kb/s and those washed areas came back again. Not that it rains much in our area but this suggests I should increase the bitrate even more, unless again, I have other settings that could help improve the image.