I've noticed traffic doing that, though it's mostly in missions. I had a Primo hit me and send my adder flying backwards a good ways.
And speaking if sentinel guy, what happened to him?
Oh, he's around - he'll pop up as you respawn after completing a job - just look for the Sentinel that goes by as you spawn in. That's him. Sometimes seen driving another car - saw him in an F620 a couple of times.
OT - yep, totally. The number of times I've had an oncoming car jump the center line and go head on with me (always at the last second so that no human could react in time to avoid it) - always for no reason, without warning and when I'm absolutely hammering it - and, of course, the impact always hurts me, hurts my armor, severely damages my car, spins me exactly 180 deg, stops me and the car I hit becomes an immovable granite monolith. Never, ever happens when I'm cruising along at 35mph - but I hit 100, it's almost a certainty. I just swerve waaay away from all traffic now - I'd rather go a little bit out of my way than have every single highway cruise end with a fatality.
On that note, totally agree about the intersection thing. Happens way too often and accurately to not be programmed into the code. I can see the intersection - no cars there - power thru - as soon as the sideroad is off-screen, game spawns a car there who plows into the side of me - happens most often when delivering cars for Simeon - it's like the AI is going out of it's way to damage you.
Two events to support the theory that R* has done this sort of thing on purpose: First one, next time you spawn in, immediately run across the road without looking both ways. Get hit by an oncoming car? Damn right you did. Cars spawn anywhere you aren't actively looking. Go to a long deserted road - no cars coming? Turn around. Now look back. Oncoming car magically appears, right?
Second, Out of Court Settlement. Anyone else notice that all the NPC traffic in that mission is scripted? That same car turns in front of you on the approach road at the same place every time - those two cars at the intersection where you shoot the lawyer - one always stops and the driver runs and the other always floors it (hitting you if you're in the way). If they can script those actions for the mission, they can do it in FR as well.
I think it's one of two things - a glitch in the AI making them zig instead of zag, or a deliberate move by R8 to, I don't know, slow us down or something. I know that I can have rendering issues if I'm going too fast - perhaps they can't have us travelling at 130mph for more than a minute at a time in FR cuz it creates too much server lag or something. We already know that they don't let the cars get anywhere near their top speeds in Online (otherwise our SP top speed would be on par with our online top speed - but it's not even close).