I think the guy was a police officer, and it looked like he was calling for pedestrians to run away from the buildings before they fell.

Yes, he was. The comments are praising him for the amount of lives he saved.

Indeed-- car's sirens are going at the end & he's using a walkie talkie

You have less awareness in a car of whats going on - for example you can't look around for falling things.

Now I'm not in an earthquake prone area, so I genuinely don't know.

But wouldn't the roof of the car provide some protection from smaller debris falling on you without you needing to "dodge", and anything bigger (like a building) you are unlikely to be able to dodge anyway.

It seems intuitively safer to stay inside the car (it's built in some ways to keep you safe), and it won't necessarily be hurt by the movement itself.

I read that it is safer to lie down alongside the car rather than be in it or under it. This is because the car won't mash down to be less than a foot thick and will support debris off you, whereas it doesn't have to crush much to kill you inside or under it.

I'm skeptical. Any recent US car has to be able to withstand at least 3X its weight, in order to make rollovers survivable. The amount of force the car's roof can withstand is much higher than how much my skull can withstand.

Surviving its weight says nothing as to how much of a dynamic impact it can withstand, and earthquake debris can fall from great heights.

A decent sized tree branch will do a lot of damage to a car’s roof. A wind storm knocked a tree branch off and onto my first car. Wasn’t pretty.

See tree falling almost on top of car - also, guy seemed to want to protect other people.

I was thinking the same and then thought, oh no, the car maybe is crushed under debris? Then when the smoke cleared I thought, phew, no, no damages to windshield - and then again - NO! - a tree across the street. Something like that could easily have crushed a car along with its occupant.

Is a normal procedure on a earthquake