Once I was driving up Highway 80, towards Lake Tahoe, in pretty good snow. I was driving way too fast. All of a sudden the car hit something in the road and did a complete 360 degree turn in about a second and a half. I thought I was a dead man. The car ended up perfectly aligned with traffic just one lane to the left, which was the shoulder. If I was a cat, that would have been one out of nine.
Your experience on Hwy 80 sounds like one of mine on I-10 somewhere between Beaumont and Houston. It was raining and the group I was travelling in was all going way too fast (say about 90 mph).... I looked to my right and the pickup truck in that lane was starting to spin out. It went on to the shoulder to the right and then the grass and I believe it completed a 360 as it slid/spun all the way to a service road on the other side of the grass where it straightened out....and then it just kept going without skipping a beat at about the same speed on the service road as what we were doing on I-10. Lucking no one on the service road was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.