A recent finding from the forums is that the GTA game code checks for the presence of a decorator named player_vehicle on entities to enable/disable certain behavior for player-driven vehicles (e.g. personal vehicles?).
Among other things, this includes:
-- somewhere *once* during initialization
DecorRegister("Player_Vehicle", 3)
-- on a vehicle
if DecorIsRegisteredAsType("Player_Vehicle", 3) then
DecorSetInt(vehicle, "Player_Vehicle", -1)
end