Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
The problem is that you can only assign abilities per vehicle, and the monsters already have a nos to bring the front up and nos to bring the front down. Without these you would be upside down on your roof 90% of the time.
As for 1.8 vehicles, you will have to wait and see.