Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are emerging as the possible solution for multiple concerns in road traffic such as mobility and safety. One of the main concerns present in VANETs is the localization and tracking of vehicles. This work presents a passive vehicle localization and tracking method based on direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The proposed method does not rely on external sources of information such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and can be used to mitigate the possibility of spoofing or to provide a second independent source of position estimation for integrity purposes. The proposed algorithm uses array signal processing techniques to estimate not only the position but also the direction of other vehicles in network. Furthermore, it is a fully passive method and can alleviate the network load since it does not require any location based data exchange and can be performed by any listening vehicle using the signal of any data transmission. A set of numerical simulations is used to validate the proposed method and the results are shown to be more precise than the average accuracy of Global Position System (GPS) receivers. © Copyright 2017 IEEE