The cart had a path it wanted to follow, but that doesn’t mean it was a path it COULD follow.
Maybe somebody accidentally put a rock too close to the road. Purkeypile said that all sorts of things could cause the cart to experience issues in that brief ride. He doesn’t elaborate further, but seems to indicate that this is just one of those bizarre decisions that was made at the time.
This means that world geometry impacted the cart in… interesting ways. Part of the reason for this complicated development process? The cart that the player is riding in is physically simulated, rather than on-rails. He starts his thread about the Skyrim intro saying that he’s seen that cart ride “easily hundreds” of times in the extensive work they had to do to get it right.
