Making a simple vehicle animation in Fusion

Hello! Years ago I created some simple top-down animations in After Effects that showed a bus driving through obstacles. They looked like this (

). I no longer have the project file or After Effects that I used to make these videos, so I'm trying to re-create this project in Fusion.

One of the main issues with the original project was that it was equation based and iterative. In other words, the position and orientation of the bus on screen at any given frame was based on the position and orientation values of each frame before it. It used two custom inputs: Speed and Steering Wheel Angle that were simple slider controls keyframed over time. It would use those two inputs to calculate the position of the "bus" on the screen at each frame. Because After Effects can't store and update variables, each frame had to re-calculate every frame before it using a loop in order to get the current position and orientation of the "bus". This meant that when rendering frame 1 it had to run 1 iteration, when rendering frame 25 it had to run 25 iterations, and when rendering frame 300 it had to run 300 iterations. This made making adjustments and rendering frames extremely slow and tedious once you got past the first few frames.

I'd like to find a better way to do it this time around, but Fusion has this same limitation as After Effects in that it can't store and update variables (unless I'm wrong). This is why I've come here seeking input.

The way I see it, there are two ways to do this using Fusion. Either I use the same brute force frame iteration strategy I used before (I really don't want to do it this way again), or I use a simple script in an environment that can store and update variables (Python probably) to pre-calculate all of the position and orientation values for each frame and import those into DaVinci as keyframes. But I'm reeeeeaaaallly hoping there's a better way of doing this that I'm just not aware of.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to achieve in Fusion (make a rectangle move around the screen using simple equations of motion) than the brute force frame re-iteration approach?

2. If not, is it possible to import outside data values as keyframe values into Fusion? For example, if I have a list of 300 X and Y values in a CSV, is there a way to bring those into Fusion as 300 frames of keyframe values for the "Center" X and Y coordinates within a transform node?

Thank you to anyone willing to offer input on this!

Is there a specific reason you can't just draw the splines that needed to be drawn?
importing CSV data is possible though.
If you go to steakunderwater.com and install Reactor, you get access to the Vonk toolset that can work with all kinds of external data.

Is there a specific reason you can't just draw the splines that needed to be drawn?.

I initially tried doing it that way and had a really hard time getting it to look correct. I found that using the equations for vehicle motion in an expression to convert speed and steering wheel angle to position and orientation gave me much more believable motion.

If you go to steakunderwater.com and install Reactor, you get access to the Vonk toolset that can work with all kinds of external data.

Thank you!

You could make a script that bakes your steering and speed based parametric animation to motion path, then you could probably evaluate the result faster and would also work around the iteration storage problem.

Though for what it's worth, an iterative expression in Fusion is way faster than in AE. Many of the Glitch Tools macros in Reactor do it, and while they're not paragons of performance, they also don't slow things to a crawl the way similar expressions did when I used to use them in my After Effects days.