Why won't Animation Play when converted to Prefabs?

Hi Everyone! I'm a newbie to game design, unity, and playmaker and this is my first post.

I'm creating a simple game where a vehicle travels down the road and "reacts" to different obstacles. Swerves away from a post, bumps up and down when rolling over bumps.

I modeled a low poly vehicle in maya and animated it then exported it to fbx. Imported that to Unity. Set up FSMs in PLAYMAKER that call the swerving and bump up and down animation when a trigger is entered.

My problem is that prior to converting to prefabs, the obstacles I set up would properly trigger the animation for my vehicle model. This is a short video that shows when it works - https://vimeo.com/101291941

But when I finally convert them to prefabs and place them back in the scene, everything would seem to work except the Play Animation Action.

I've been trying to troubleshoot this for a week by repeating everything from scratch again and again but still I can't understand why the animation won't play despite there being no error message at all.

Help!