Unpossessed Vehicle Won't Respond

I’m using auto possession for the player to possess one car, and if I add a button press event to toggle the AI on the car then the AI works fine on the possessed car, but if it isn’t possessed and a run the AI events with something like begin play then it will not work. The car won’t move, even when it shows in the blueprint debugging that the nodes are firing. It’s almost as if Set Throttle doesn’t work if the car isn’t possessed, which doesn’t seem to make sense.