Abstract Most existing production vehicle tracking services rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and a proprietary server/client infrastructure. This type of inflexible and centralized architecture incurs severe vender-dependency and high service cost. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective decentralized vehicle remote positioning and tracking system architecture. This architecture only consists of two components: (1) a vehicle terminal for collecting real-time vehicle location from a navigation satellite system and report it to a user terminal via the existing mobile network and (2) a user terminal on a mobile phone for analyzing the location information from (1) and inform the owner. We prototype the positioning and tracking system using the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and Global System for Mobile Communication(GSM) Network. Experiment results illustrate that the system is capable of tracking vehicle location and warning the owner if the vehicle unexpectedly moves more than 100 m at low cost. With maximum vender-neutrality and high-availability as the design philosophy, the system is able to utilize multiple available navigation satellite systems and mobile networks.