1. In GTA SA, it was almost impossible to drive normally without damaging your car, when you tried to look cool in a Turismo, you either got tailgated by a speeding driver, had a frontal collision because the car on the other side ran over a bike and came over to your side of the road, you got t-boned at a green light by suspects fleeing from a police chase or even hit by a crashing airplane. Either way, driving in San Andreas was incredibly fun but sometimes it was really annoying that you couldn't drive for 30 Sekonds without any damage to your car.
GTAIV car handling war probably the most realistic from all GTAs. Other GTAs made it 'too easy' to drive a car when in real life it's much more difficult. With IV they allowed you to adjust the cars speed (R2 with standard controls) and the breaking was much more realistic.
2. In almost every GTA games which included huge cities, the streets looked almost empty. In a huge city like New York, like in GTA IV, there should be very heavy traffic, but even if I put traffic on max, the time square in GTA IV still looked pretty empty.
Its a delicate balance with realism and gameplay. If star junction was always full of traffic it would be crap to drive through. People need to remember this is GTA. I want realism too but not too much, after all this still is a game.
3. The damage model of the cars looked always very unrealistic. Do you think we will get realistic damage models in GTA V?
Agree with you here, there were some improvements but in IV I basically had a side crash which only resulted in some scratched bodywork. Although some parts did improve, especially some cars going to the left after too much frontal damage. It is hard though to create real damage after all, if most GTA crashes happened in real life, likelihood is you will be in intensive care or dead.
4. And the last question...Am I the only one who thinks it is annoying that the car always starts burning and explodes when turned over on its roof? I really never liked this and I hope they will take it out in GTA V. What do you think about this?
I like this. I wouldn't want it to change but I think it won't anyway, since if you just leave cars around on the map you'll need trucks to take them to a scrapyard or something.
One thing I would like to add is I hope the return of the petrol opener thing on cars where if you hit them then the vehicle blows up.