I noticed some complaints from people re:comparing this game to next-gen titles being unfair...but it's not like we haven't seen full, detailed cockpits in last-gen games.
Fully functional tach, speedo, and odo. Everything in the cockpit casts shadows including the A-pillar and stereo knobs. That was in 2011. (too bad the career mode was lame)
The other side of this coin though, is that EA never greenlighted a sequel to this series as far as I know, and it may be the case that high fidelity cockpits are cost prohibitive unless you have AAA funding to splash around. PCARS had Kickstarter funding and Assetto Corsa has the benefit of Early Access money to fund ongoing development.
That's not the point we were discussing. People were claiming that Grid Autosport doesn't look as good as #Driveclub. Of course it is not! One is a multiplataform game designed to run on a 2005 hardware. The other is an exclusive title designed to run on a 2013 machine with much more memory and processing power. We were talking about the visuals in general, not about the interiors alone.
It's all about resources alocation. On Grid 2 we had sparks falling from suspended train tracks, animals crossing the roads, firecrackers, beautiful vegetation, nice lightining and textures overall, etc. It's not like they've cuted out the cars interiors and didn't pushed other stuff to "compensate". We have to remember that the game was runing on consoles with only 512MB of RAM. Having full interiors would mean less sceneries details, less AI opponents on track, etc. Cars interiors might be as complex as their full external mesh, and probably carry more textures, etc. So they decided to make this compromise. Wrong call, we all agree. Hell, even Codemasters guys themselves might agree with that. They tried to appeal to the Need for Speed fan base, but that's not where their public is. See, nobody expects Codemasters to pull out a Simbin out of nothing, but we do ask for some level of authenticity.
They've made the wrong move, it happens. But remember that Grid Autosport is beeing made re-using old assets. They're not making everything from scratch, although it's not fair to say that Grid Autorsport is basically Grid 2 with mods, like some people said. But at this height, it wouldn't make sense to spend time and resources to model the interiors of more than 80 cars. Remember that many people complained that Grid Autosport is not beeing released for the new consoles. So, if now it seems a little late (I disagree) to release a game for the Xbox 360 and PS3, it would be madness to delay the game for the next year just to have full interiors. It doesn't comes with a magic trick.
You mentioned Project Cars and Assetto Corsa. These games are not beeing held back by consoles with 512MB of RAM. And Need for Speed Shift run like ass on these consoles, even though it is not the most beautiful game out there. Try to make a Nurburgring race with 15 AI cars to see if it's playable. Trust me, it is not. Codies games run much more smoothly, beautifully, and even not trying to be a simulator (and Shift did tried to be one), their physics system makes much more sense than the on used on Shift games.