The second puzzle takes time but it's doable. Yea, the car one is weird. I think they designed it so you almost have to fail to add to the story somehow.
I fucked up on the car prompts pretty epically myself, but there didn't seem to be any penalty for that? Moments where I would clearly run over construction workers and shit, would just magically cut to a point where I wasn't running them over..?
But in the second trial you could fail it, and get Ethan really fucking hurt and as I got about half way through the electric wire my screen was so blurry and red I could barely see fuck all and as I knew there was a way out - I took it.
Maybe I could have made it across, but also because of how frustratingly clunky and unnaturally this game controls it took so much trial and error to work out where you were going to go, it just seemed unlikely. At least I knew which way, was the way back.