Animate one axis with the new timeline

I have a car object that I very simply animate on the X - axis. I made sure I deleted ALL keys for the other two axis in timeline itself and by drilling down into the animation window.
There are no default values, keys or anything for the Y and Z axis.

However, even though the animation should only be altering the X axis, it seems to be not only setting the Y and Z values, but all 3 rotation axis too?

I read back in 2012 there was a similar problem with animations and that using a parent object was the hacky fix, but I can’t believe 5 years later in 2017 and with a new system this is still a problem?

It’s been a while I know, but just to clarify, it’s not “hacky”, it’s how it supost to work. If you don’t have any parent in you GameObject, you’ll be animating in world space, just that’s it, if your animation set you to x = 0, you’ll be set to x = 0. But if you have a parent you’ll be animating in local space, that means you parent can walk around and the child will follow, and again will be set to x = 0, but the parent x is what you’ll be seeing.