Vehicle Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a dynamic decentralized network that consists of various wireless mobile vehicles with no individual user management. Several routing protocols can be used for VANETs, for example, the Location-Aided Routing (LAR) protocol that utilizes location information provided by the Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors. It can help to reduce the search space for the desired route—limiting the search space results in fewer route discovery messages. However, two essential aspects are ignored while applying the LAR protocol in the VANET-based environment. Firstly, the LAR does not exploit the fact that nodes in VANET do not have pure random movement. In other words, nodes in LAR predict the position of destination node by ignoring the fact that the pre-defined constraint on the destination node navigation is met. Secondly, the nodes in the conventional LAR (or simply stated as LAR) protocol use the location information of the destination node before selecting the route location, which is most likely to expire because of the fast movement of the nodes in the VANET environment. This study presents an estimation based on a heuristic approach that was developed to reject weak GPS location data and accept accurate ones. The proposed routing protocol stated as Rectangle-Aided LAR (RALAR) is based on a moving rectangular zone according to the node′s mobility model. Additionally, the proposed RALAR protocol was optimized by using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) by selecting the most suitable time-out variable. The results were compared with LAR and Kalman-Filter Aided-LAR (KALAR), the most commonly utilized protocols in VANET for performance metrics using Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), average End-to-End Delay (E2E Delay), routing overhead and average energy consumption. The results showed that the proposed RALAR protocol achieved an improvement over the KALAR in terms of PDR of 4.7%, average E2E delay of 60%, routing overhead of 15.5%, and 10.7% of energy consumption. The results proved that the performance of the RALAR protocol had outperformed the KALAR and LAR protocol in terms of regular network performance measures in the VANET environment.