One thing you can do without connecting is sniff -n- track. Regardless if you connect, you can sniff things like tire pressure monitor transmitters or bluetoot

One thing you can do without connecting is sniff -n- track. Regardless if you connect, you can sniff things like tire pressure monitor transmitters or bluetooth addresses. At least officially there is no publicly known database of license plate pix and sniffed MAC addresses. Obviously being blindingly obvious idea, there probably is a secret one. So you only need enough optical data gathering to match MACs to plates with excellent lines of sight and OCR and so forth, then you can get away with deploying simple RF sniffers all over the place that don't need LOS and can be much cheaper. Note that you can track cops this way, not just victims ^H^H err consumers I mean. And obviously the "smarter" the car the easier this tracking works, you're not going to track a restored 1972 Gran Torino off its bluetooth.