It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was just enough in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out of me.
Humans have millions of years of evolution behind our visual processing systems. We have developed hacks that prevent our brain from getting tricked by unusual situations like traffic lights on trucks or backwards cars being towed. We only developed the first computers a hundred years ago, and only in the last 40 years have a small subset of people started learning about visual processing systems.
It's easy to look at this video and scoff because of how trivial it seems. But it's instead a marvel of our minds that we can pick up on context clues so quickly and accurately that such oddities basically never puzzle us. Given the pace of our innovation, it wouldn't surprise me if our computer systems match ours within a few human generations at latest.