Do aliens killed by car count as kills

You are still in tutorial mode, are forced to shoot on the other alien, just hit Tab to change to second alien, and then you'll be free to shoot it, and continue the mission as you see fit.

Take notice that later in that mission you will be encouraged to use the rocket launcher to kill some aliens that appear later, however, this time it's not mandatory and you can kill them in whatever way you see fit.

I just reloaded my game about 10 times trying to figure this out and I have some results. I tested the same 5 colonels, randomly mixing them together in testing, every single one of them was psi gifted, but not every time. It is not determined when the character is created, the fact that the colonel with the lowest will became gifted but only once out of the 10 times points to randomly gifting the soldiers being tested but adding their will score to the roll.

Simply put, if you want your favorite characters to all be psychics it is easy, it will just take a long time, you will have to put them through testing by themselves or with rookies added in and keep reloading until they become psychic then work on the next character. I have gotten 2 out of the 3 as gifted in about half of the 10 tests, but I was not able to garner a 3 for 3.