What would you do on this parametized animation?

When the vehicle moves back, there are two options. 1st) Move to the left 2nd) Move to the right... and you have a standard animation for moving back, you could scale it if you want. But what would you do to deal with this variety of move-backs, do you 1st) create 2 different animations, one for the left and one for the right, OR, just bake one animation and give a factor to determine it is left or right, all the times, I could have created a cross product with the direction of the object with the up vector of the object and multiply it by a left-right factor... What is the preferred way for you? Thanks Jack