The shadow casting from my one light (DominantDirectional) is really low, i know ive seen in other games using udk, really crisp real time shadows. do i need to up some setting or something? i'd like to have nice crisp shadows.

i'm assuming that those shadows are baked into the lightmaps and to get crisper shadows from that you'll have to increase the amount of lightmap pixels available to areas where you want crisp shadows. either increase the lightmap res on the whole geometry in the editor or tweak the UVs to give important areas more space in the lightmaps.

The car is going to be moving in real time though, i've baked nothing yet. isn't there a way to have things move in real time and still cast a nice hard shadow?

Go to the properties tab of your dominant directional light and turn up the 'Num whole scene shadow cascades' in the Cascaded ShadowMaps tab to 2 or 3 and your shadows should become sharper.
Don't forget to take a look at the Shadow radius and turn it up to at least a value above zero to prevent shadows from turning low res too fast.

-Goodluck!