One news guy called the car a Mercedes. Not sure what we actually know about make/model. But the explosion part isn’t mysterious to me, assuming the car was gasoline powered. Having been licensed to buy/sell/use explosives for nearly half a century I’ve seen lots of combinations of “blow-ups.” When I saw that first video of the downstream portion of the blast I knew it was not from explosives. It was low velocity, yellowish, very little smoke initially, and pretty much had to be from vaporized gasoline.
Once the car hit the “jump”, whatever it was, and went airborne, the fuel tank clearly ruptured. When gasoline spills with velocity it vaporizes instantly and that vapor is hellforexplosive. The car cabin would have been intact for a few seconds, filling with vapor. As soon as there was a spark, steel-on-steel, electrical short, whatever, the resulting blast would have shredded the car carcass.
Resulting smoke and fire would have been from all the plastic/rubber/underwear the car was made out of plus whatever it might have hit on the ground, altho it looks like the facility was mostly concrete and steel.
Anyway, not to worry about the car shredding. It was capable of doing that by itself, especially at 100 or so MPH. My only real curiosity is how powerful was that car to get that much speed in the apparent block or so that it started from?
With “Launch Control” (oh the irony) there’s a Bentley that can do 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. Anything around or over that is probably enough to give us the observed results.
I'm still amazed that gasoline is capable of doing such major league damage. One would expect much higher powered explosives involved especially since they were mentioned.But I'm no expert on the topic.