Right, polies have a very small effect on PO. It's the texture drawing which cause huge problems. I ran a test on this pile of piss PC with Oggo's B196, and ran it with original textures (1x2048 iirc), and then downsized them, then got rid of the texture entirely, then got rid of a bunch of polies from the shape.
The results surprised me to start off with...
I had an unplayable game with the 2048 texture, and it was a hell of a lot better with the 1x1024. Once I deleted the texture entirely, my PO was minimal, then once I quartered the polycount, my PO dropped by something like 2%, which is nothing tbh.
So imo, you can have a stupid polycount and a fantastic damage model, but only if you use decent sized textures. This is where e-shumi's ferrari is ridiculous imo, 33,000 polies, AND 3x2048 textures, it would make any game completely unplayable unless you have a beast PC. It doesn't help that there are no lower lods either.
Still, high polycount, reasonable textures is perfectly ok imo, but high polycount hi-res textures are a big no-no, especially for someone like me running a 5-year old system which can't even run the default cars with any reasonable quality