I'm actually seeing some hitching in the car demo on my reasonably fast dev machine, particularly when I'm interacting with the bridge (computing contact forces of a bunch of bodies connected with joints is a lot of work): http://piqnt.com/planck.js/Car
Have you looked at perf yet? How does the performance of your rewrite planck.js compare to a compiled emscripten version?
Would you ever consider using something like ASM.js or WebAssembly? Physics libraries are definitely one of those performance-critical applications where this kind of stuff actually matters a whole lot.