Based on the photos available so far, we do not know the exact angle and point of impact. The arrow drawn on the picture I just looked at is just that - an arrow drawn on a picture.
Based on the many (and there have been many) automobile crashes and post-crash scenes I have witnessed, cleaned-up, and/or been a party to, nothing in that picture - not the engine, not the debris field, not even the front driver’s side wheel/tire assembly - is situated in a manner as to lead me to suspect anything other than a high speed impact with a tree, in the median, at some angle between approximately 30 and 60 degrees to the original direction of travel.
I have to agree with ‘wideawake’ on this one. It appears to me that the conspiracy-theorists are jumping the gun on this one (at least based on the information available so far - and with the caveat that I, of course, was not there and did not witness the event).
Claims of bombs and pre-crash explosions aside, I once had a crash quite similar to the one in question (at least as it has been described in the media). I drove a small European sport sedan more-or-less head-on in to the end of a highway guardrail (after crossing from the right to the left side of the road) at about 110 mph. While in my case the engine did not detach from the chassis, other parts of the car ended up as far away as 350 feet from the point of impact, and they were not situated in a straight line along the direction of travel at impact. They were spread out in a sort of ‘fan’ pattern.
When a car is turning (rotating about its vertical axis)during a crash, the path of any parts/debris which fly off will describe an arc in three dimensions, the length and radius of the arc, and its angle(s) in the horizontal and vertical planes, will be dependent upon the force of impact and the rotational forces acting on the car at the time of impact, and on the part in question at its time of departure from the vehicle (as well as the size, weight, shape and drag coefficient of the part, of course).
The bottom line is, the disintegration of an automobile after a high speed impact is a complicated ‘dance’ with the laws of physics, and its results can seem very strange and can be difficult to explain.
As far as the location of the driver’s side wheel/tire assembly goes, when a wheel/tire detaches from a vehicle during a crash, it is absolutely impossible to predict its subsequent behavior, especially if it continues rolling and or has other parts still hanging off of it (such as hubs, brake rotors, tie-rods, etc).
I once found a wheel/tire/brake assembly from a Mazda RX-7 12-15 feet up in a tree, almost directly perpendicular to the vehicle’s path at impact, about 250 feet away from and on the opposite side of the car (this was following a high-speed crash on a road racing course where I was working as a Corner-Marshall). I witnessed the crash, and I still have no idea how the wheel & tire ended up in that tree.
Said much better than I could hope to say it.
Fascinating post.