The point of multiple passengers: friends/gangs.
It's far easier to think of MTA:VC as having classes, instead of teams. It's more deathmatch with classes, not team deathmatch.
First step: Forget everything Iam just told you.
Got that? Good.
Second step: Open up C:\WINDOWS\mta.ini with notepad, and edit the line that points to your gta-vc.exe
or just delete C:\WINDOWS\mta.ini
or run MTA with the -resetgamepath flag (you can edit your shortcut to MTA so it says "C:\Program Files\MTAClient.exe" -resetgamepath (or wherever you have your MTAClient.exe placed)
oops... Turns out my "fix" was wrong (wait a few minutes). When they respawn, their skins will be correct. (By the way, purple is mexicans, and since it's the best class in most people's eyes, almost everyone spawns as them)