Consider the default setup (as outlined in exe/road.py), where allow_crashing is set to false. Consider a situation where the car is in column 0 going at speed 2, and there's an obstacle at (0, 0).
If I go LEFT here, the probability transition matrix considers this action to be equivalent to CRUISE | NO_OP, but the reward function considers this action to reduce the forward movement by 1, which isn't exactly CRUISE.