I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?

I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.

Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"

One of the first games I remember seeing (I was maybe 7 years old) was Test Drive, I still remember it features gas stations as checkpoints: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b03NIAoH2g4/hq720.jpg?

It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!

Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.