I was hoping vehicle quests would go away entirely. Let me play my character.

Well, they're not technically vehicle quests per se - they give you the vehicle bar, but you largely play your own character. One quest is simply a meditation game were you need to keep from going under or over a certain scale to succeed. The other is a sniper kind of mini-game that is actually really fun (except for it constantly being bugged or reset by people starting the event while you're mid-way through it). Like you, I prefer to play my own character, so I'm hoping they keep these quests to a minimum and make them smaller scale. They can help break the monotony of questing so long as they don't overdo it.

@Gaurisk

That's what dungeons, PvP and most quests are for. And I think the "vehicle" quests (alliance side) are done very well in The Jade Forest. Out of the 2 hours questing I did, I think about 10-15 minutes was in a vehicle. Two of them were novel types, also, that the WoW graphics/gameplay engine had never done before. Although, some of them were just spam this button. It, along with the cutscenes, gave a good break to the flow of quests, and give memorable gameplay (instead of just "Collect 10 bear asses").