Recent research in VANETs is increasingly focusing on unified approaches that simultaneously tackle location/identity privacy and trust management—recognizing that vehicles must both protect their sensitive data and also establish reliable trust relationships with peers and infrastructure. These works propose frameworks where vehicles authenticate anonymously (via pseudonyms, zero-knowledge proofs, or blockchain?based identity systems) while context-aware trust models (based on behavior history, message consistency, link quality and collaborative feedback) evaluate the trustworthiness of senders and their communicated events. Many schemes embed trust scores and revocation records into distributed ledgers (blockchain) to ensure immutability and transparency, while also maintaining unlinkability and traceability only under authorized circumstances. By integrating privacy-preserving authentication, adaptive trust evaluation (handling various traffic densities and mobility conditions), and decentralized trust record management, these advancements aim to deliver vehicular networks that are secure, reliable, private, and robust against internal and external malicious actors in dynamic smart-mobility environments.