I can conclusively reveal that in fact we do NOT have 80,000 polygons on average per car.
...
It's actually closer to 96,000...
Some cars have around 85,000 polygons, but many go as high as 105,000. The McLaren F1 LM (my favourite PGR3 car!) clocked in at over 100,000. Obviously these counts include the car interiors as well as the exteriors, but they don't include the extra geometry to display car damage, which can add between 10,000 and 20,000 more triangles per car.
Here are a couple of in-game shots from PGR3 for comparison... Please be aware that we use the same shaders and geometry in the showroom as we do in the "real" game (i.e. we don't downsample the cars at all).
http://www.bizarreonline.net/index.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=61