Unity with some custom C++ module for hardware interfacing should do everything you need to do.

the point is that what you have to do is hardly rocket science.. so pretty much any engine / framework / brute force in-house developing are perfectly capable to deliver a driving simulation... this has been done for ages.

the element here is how cost effective any solution would be.. and this is a question only you can answer because it is largely dependent on the team involved and the skills available. Content pipeline and workflow is also a big point, and again, the only solution would be to test and see how you team feels about that particular solution.
At the beginning of this year we had a "love affair" with Unity and we really were amazed by how fast we could get things working.. but then content management started to become a problem because the workflow we are used to as company didn't quite fit in the Unity's approach to it... se we decided to cancel every holiday on the calendar and go for an in house solution.
What I suggest to you is to identify 2-3 candidate technologies and give each of them 2-3 weeks by putting your entire team on the tech. This will waste you a couple of months but it might give you some useful hints on how the team is reacting to the single candidate.

it's also important to understand what kind of "driving" you are talking about.. if it's about cruising at 40kmh in a city or on a country road then you won't need any real physics modeling.. as long the steer turns left and the car goes left you're done. But if your "driving" means driving in any kind of limit siutation: racing, evasion manouvers, low grip conditions then you'll have many more problems from trying to model a believable car than any other element in the project.

so if i have to build a team from scratch for such a project what are the skill sets needed?
i can suggest to management to hire some people to make a prototype on a contract basis in india.

as i have said it depends on the level of simulation you want to achieve. if the simulation is not about driving on the edge but driving around in a car and obey to speed limits and general traffic rules, interact with other cars then you just need a standard programmer able to code all the rules the driver will have to follow and the associate AI for the "NPC" cars... but you're still in the realm of typical game programmer.

If your sim is about racing or driving on the limit of tyre adeshion, then it's quite unlikely you can shop around for a "team"... you need somebody that understands about physic, about car dynamics and is a programmer... let's say I happen to know these aren't the kind of peple you can find easily and all of them they are already working for somebody else.. so if that's your plan, your best move would be, by far, contacting a company that already does driving simulators and license their code, or hire them to write the car dynamics part of your sim.

@Wan... nice link to Brian Beckman's video.. I saw that name on Channel 9 but I didn't know it was THAT Beckman... probably he was the first one to write about car dynamics on the internet way before year 2000...