In prinicple I agree
ie that as a driver, not being able to detect that one wheel is spinning and the other is not, is pretty shoddy. Given the symtoms, even a cack-handed muppet like me could tell it was a software problem in desperate need of a reboot.
However, there are 2 points:
He's probably driving an American car. Which means there's 3 tons and 16ft of poorly built and cheap metal, oil, rubber and plastic between him and the wheels, which probably meant he had f* all feedback to begin with. He could probably run over a moose and not detect it, never mind notice some wheelspin. That and the system being unable to recover from a 'value exception state' on the fly is pretty bad too.
He did seem to soldier on a bit too long IMO, but you wouldn't immediately stop and do a full mechanical strip down every time it "coughed". 20 blocks is a bit long to make an informed decision though, I agree...