My take is the area of graphics have been emphasized too much as a benchmark for driving games, and improvements there are hyped up as being all that.  What I see as far as graphics go, is that they are good enough for now.  There are diminishing returns to try to get graphics to be even better then they are now, and I believe only the most biased of fanboys is going to argue that Forza 3 "blows away" GT5, and visa-versa.  So, in light of that, I would like to focus on talking about other areas to driving games that matter.  So, in light of this, I would like to ask:

Besides graphics, what should be improved for driving games?  Myself, I would be interested in seeing a Google map based driving game.  It is likely absurdly possibly, but I think the idea of doing something like an updated version of "The Great American Road Race" that Activision did, would be very cool.  In it, you raced from one part of America to another part, on actual highways.  Now, if this were to allow for Google Maps to render about every road in America, that would be cool to me.  So, in other words, MUCH larger driving area could be one way to improve driving games.  Well, I am curious what others would be interested in seeing, so I am posting this thread here.

Physics is where they'll improve the most. Next gen physics processing will be no problem, so that's where we'll start seeing extremely realistic driving sims.

What about fun factor?

@boutros

gt5 and forza are fun.

You want kiddie fun then play something else. Like burnout or mario kart.

Two areas I would like to see improved are

- the driving feedback physics

- gear controls

Gear controls in particular be it because of the minimal feedback can be rather unintuitive,

 leaving manual gear changes only to those who put in alot of time and effort.

Making the games easier to play so that more people can play them. Giving people a variety of tracks and real life, so that people can drive around and explore places rather than going round tracks all the time. Also I think they should let people drive with their hands rather than a controller. JK on the last part, but serious now I think they should include lessons on how to drive in cities, make the technology useful.

This.

Better controls (Not using an analog stick to drive a car)

physics, damage system(not only on visual aspect) and mechanical tuning.

Add red shells, bananas, fake item boxes, boost pads, stars and mushrooms.