Wii U version of Project CARS facing troubles, likely cancelled

[captain carot]

The engine is the same Madness engine already used for SHIFT, Test Drive Ferrari and SHIFT 2.

Occlusion culling is really nothing new. It was in the early 2000's. AFAIK most (bigger) PC games use it.
Hell, Cry Engine uses multiple culling techniques by default, though some have to be optimiesed at hand for the best performance.
So i'd basically bet they have culling techniques. Without reading through their tech docs in the WMD forum.

For the fps side, you are missing something. They actually need more than 7 fps. Which would be a 30% increase.
They have an average 23fps. With much lower framerates as well. They'll need to not drop under 30fps for a at least good playable racing game.

That might look as good or better than SHIFT 2. But it still wouldn't work with SETA and other demanding stuff.

So no leaderboards for Wii U. Probably no weather or at least no dynamic weather. Less cars offline and probably online. This is a real current gen game and though Wii U has a current gen feature set it has far less power than the other devices.
Then there's still the question who would really buy that.

Batching isnt actually new either.