But the core text was hand-written, and the code faithfully represents the logic of the hand-crafted original from 30 years ago.

I might build something else on top of this though, and will try to keep parking in mind!

Good luck with figuring it out!

So, it's sort of intended, but also not very significant one way or the other.

I am the author of this thing, and I find your comment very amusing. ;-)

I wrote the rest of it "by hand" though.

I speak with some authority on the matter. ;-)

As I said in the summary article, the core is a "textbook" 2D rigid body simulation (the "Brick" layer), and the Car bit is mostly a matter of deciding what forces are applied to the tyres.

In short, the tires "like" to go back and forward, but resist going sideways (relative to the direction they are pointing in).

The forces which are applied at the tyres are roughly equivalent to friction, but not quite (friction is stranger than many people think, and is not actually very velocity dependent). In some ways my tyre forces actually behave more like a form of "viscous drag" actually. I knew this was a bit dodgy at the time, and it was a sort of conscious "hack" that was chosen to produce "playable" behaviour as simply as I could.

I was a bit pushed for time, and didn't feel inclined to try making the diagrams myself.

Still, I agree that they're a bit "slop adjacent". However, I thought they would be better than nothing for someone trying to get their bearings.. and I did iterate on them a bit to get them to be more useful than the initial clanker efforts!