I feel like this thread has gone more like an AIBU than a more typical Relationships one. MN is changing, clearly.
To answer some points. (Apologies OP for speaking about you in the third person.)
The OP might originally have said that there is no backstory, but that doesn't mean that her DH isn't like this regularly. No backstory means that she hadn't done something massive in the morning to piss him off, or something like that.
Secondly. It's very, very clear from the OP alone that this is not an isolated incident. Read between the lines. OP posted in a casual, almost offhand, curious way. You can tell that she is upset, and rightly so, but her tone is not at all shocked. Now, if your husband who is normally calm, reasonable and acts in an emotionally healthy way suddenly had an aggressive, swearing outburst and drove aggressively with children in the car, you would NOT be feeling any kind of casual. You would not be questioning whether this was abuse or if it was your fault. You would be thinking "WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED!?" You would be wondering if he was ill or on drugs. You would be driven crazy by the fact he had just left without warning, after such out of character behaviour, and be worried and phoning everybody who knew him to try and find out where he was.
OP was able to remain calm for the children, rather than saying, wait, hang on, stop everything, what the hell is wrong? Which means that his outburst was not particularly surprising and she has learned how best to try and minimise it. She did not panic when he left. This was totally in-character for him, and while it is shocking and upsetting to experience somebody behaving like this at any time, the reaction is totally different when it's something that you have come to expect on some level. This might have been a worse reaction than overreactions he's had before or it might be comparable, but the OP is not talking about it and reacting as she would if her husband was normally a kind, patient, tolerant and reasonable man.
Thirdly. As trackrBird says, people don't start out behaving at this level. You don't go on a first date and shout and swear, slam things around and drive aggressively. Perfectly nice people don't suddenly morph into that person, either. It is a slow effect, a drip drip. A tiny overreaction to begin with which becomes normalised or explained away, they get worse, the triggers become looser, over time the relationship resembles an unexploded bomb, but it didn't start that way. This is also why it feels unsurprising to somebody living with those behaviours. You don't notice your children growing until their clothes are too small, and you don't notice abuse growing either. Every day is normal and every day continues to be normal until you have a lightbulb moment and look around and realise, wait, this is not normal. But it's very difficult to get to that point. Abuse doesn't have handy checkpoints, like clothing, to alert you to the fact that it's happening, so it becomes normal, very very slowly. I think that even abusers often don't realise what is happening.
Hence, abuse doesn't always look like what we think of as abuse. Most abuse is quite alarmingly everyday. Because we normalise it when we are living it, we might even joke and laugh about it, not even realising that we are experiencing something totally different to a friend laughing about her husband's non-abusive annoying behaviour. It is VERY easy to dismiss individual incidents of abusive behaviour as "a bad day" or a misunderstanding. This is dangerous and a mistake, because it traps women in abusive situations.
It is not always assumed on MN that the man is an abuser. In almost every single thread I have seen (and that is a lot, in seven years) where abuse is called out/suspected on page one, the OP comes back with more information and it becomes clear that yes, this is an abusive situation and very clearly. It doesn't come out in post one, because abuse feels normal when you're living it and hence you post about it as though it is a normal problem. There are little tells, giveaways, signs in an OP which make an abusive dynamic immediately apparent to somebody with experience. I HAVE seen people proved wrong on this, but I can remember maybe two or three threads where this happened, and easily hundreds where the opposite happened: The posters calling abuse were proven right. (As has happened on this thread, where OP came back and mentioned that she walks on eggshells and knew he would be annoyed if she spent too long in the shop). I've also seen several threads where some pretty bad incident was mentioned, but it was not abuse, and the OP got good advice in the thread and was able to hopefully resolve it. I get a little tired of this "MN thinks everything is abuse" rhetoric because it is just untrue. And as for the sexism/double standards argument - posters can only respond to the OP of a thread. They can't talk to their partner or anybody else who is involed. So while it might seem that a woman in an abusive situation is advised to leave whereas a woman who is acting abusively is advised to seek help, that's because you can't talk to somebody who isn't there, and it's only appropriate to give advice to the person who is posting. It's no use telling an abusive poster "Your husband should leave you!" because she's hardly likely to pass that on, and it doesn't help her to change her behaviour. Likewise telling an abused woman "Your husband should seek help" is unhelpful because even if she does pass it on, it needs to come from him to be successful. And it might give her false hope and encourage her to stay in the relationship for longer.
Nobody, ever, left a happy, secure and loving relationship after reading a post on an internet forum. If people are posting about whether they should leave, they have already considered leaving. If people are wondering if their relationship is abusive, they generally already have an idea that it is. You don't get perfectly happy people posting about whether to leave because their DH put the crumby knife back in the butter, unless it's a joke post. And people in happy, secure relationships don't feel confused and wrong-footed and insecure after arguments, they don't feel unable to approach their partner about something that is bothering them, because they can talk to their partner and resolve it. It's when you can't talk, because they totally refuse, or sulk, or get really really upset or become aggressive, that you end up asking for advice on an internet forum. If you could just talk to your partner about things, that wouldn't be necessary.
OP, I am very sorry for the massive detour, and I hope you are okay.