This is quite straightforward:
I notice that no matter what, I get empty ambient vehicles whenever I place down an IED Threat module. Even setting the VBIED threat to none and disabling all ambient vehicles (from both Civilian and Military placement modules) does not change this.
So in the end the entire IED TAOR ends up populated with empty vehicles, which have massive potential to significantly degrade the performance in larger maps/TAORs. So even if not possible to disable the ambient vehicles, virtualizing them until a player gets near should save some precious performance.