I need to steal a car quickly to go off road with.

I am a rigger. The vehicle I am going for isn't likely going to be a riggable. So I'll have to smash a window and get in..

Is it as easy as a real life car jacking? Smashing a window and then hot wiring the car?

On another note. I'd like to keep anything I steal.. I am aware that there are tags and methods of tracking.. So how would somebody steal a drone without having people come after them.

If this is sr4, you can likely hack the vehicle through wifi and drive it using a command program or by ordering it's pilot software to drive on it's own. If it's not a security vehicle or owned by someone with shadowrunner like level of paranoia, then it's firewall will be fairly weak, and it shouldn't have a lot of IC or other security. Once you hack it, you can remote drive it for a while, or simply use the wifi to tell it to open the door so you can get in and drive by hand (which I imagine will be what you intend to do with it,) but without a rigger box it won't be anything you can rig.

Once you steal the vehicle, you will want to spoof it's vehicle ID, hack its user accounts (IE: delet the orginal owner) so only you can do anything with it, and you may need to either drive it to somewhere outside the gridguide system (out of town, a private parking garage, whatever) or just hack the grid guide system (so the theft won't be easy to track latter). You will also want to do a once over with a signal scanner (scan program on your commlink will work just fine) and burn out any RFID chips with a tag eraser. If there are any security chips, you will need to either hack them or remove them. You will find chips on just about every part of the vehicle, so this could take a while. It would also be a good idea to wipe it's software and reinstall new stuff.

Anything with gridlink can be tracked at all times so you have to turn that off. This will tend to result in issues with the cops. Lots of vehicles would have anti-theft tags/transmitters hidden in them that would require a significant amount of time to find. You could use a high powered jammer to stop them from alerting anyone, but this is the kind of thing that doesn't work too well driving down the street. If might work OK in the woods, but SR jammers jam everything, including your comlinks.

For a small drone you toss it in a small Faraday cage or use a jammer. For a large drone you have to have a plan, as a steel lynx isn't easy to steal, transport or hide.

Okay. So the process goes like..

Scan to find the node. (Every time I scan my GM says I find 100's of nodes.. How do I narrow it down?)

Hack the node (Hacking + Exploit?)

Can I spoof a command to drive to the barrens? Or should I straight up hack it.

I'll command it to open a door, so I can drive to the barren area... (Static zone in this case where I am going)

Once inside I spoof a new ID.

I can burn out RFID chips just fine..

How do I get rid of Security chips? Apparently there are so many in a vehicle its not worth stealing... How do I get past them all? And how do they get checked? Whats the risk of leaving them in a vehicle.

Oh ho ho, is that so? SR4A, pg 246.

"ECM and ECCM: One of the easiest ways to control the radio frequencies of an operational zone is through the use of jamming. Jammers can be configured to allow your signals through while blocking others. The more powerful the jamming device, the better."

First problem, getting hundreds of nodes (SR4A pg 221): "Devices: The Matrix exists on a series of devices. A device in this case is defined as any hardware with Matrix connectivity enabled, whether wired or (far more commonly) wireless.
There are three broad categories of devices. A device can be a peripheral device, a commlink, or a nexus."

So I'd say you can AT LEAST sort for "peripheral devices," and, unless the owner of the car has altered it's Access ID in some way, you can probably search for nodes linked to "Hot Pink 2058 Tata Hotspurs," which would probably only leave you with the one you want.

Correct about hacking. Since you want fast, this is On The Fly: you roll Hacking + Exploit each combat turn until you get hits equal to the target's firewall, and each turn it rolls Analyze + Firewall, and if those hits (cumulative) ever reach the rating of your Stealth program, an alert triggers.

Spoofing a command to make it drive to the barrens is probably faster than setting yourself up a nice account; however, it might be wise to then spoof a command to tell it to shut down its wireless, so its owner doesn't go "wtf?" and redirect it.

There are two different RFID chips you need to look out for; security and stealth. Security chips squawk certain info about the car 24/7 and in the clear; this makes them easy to find. However, they can't be burnt out with a tag eraser, so you need to physically remove them or hack the shit out of them. Stealth chips only give information to users with the correct access; this means you'll have to comb through the car with a tag eraser, bringing it within 1 cm of every surface that could harbour a chip. Basically, you're going to have to take it apart and put it back together. Too much trouble? Not if your Industrial Mechanic skill is high and you have an Industrial Mechanic shop set up out in the barrens... Otherwise, you'll have to accept the risk of stealth tags, which means stolen rides would be strictly temporary.

I can imagine, however, that certain individuals (either really criminal ones like mob bosses or really rich teenage corp brats) would value their privacy so highly they'd want to own vehicles without any tracking tags at all. Talk to your GM.

Can you give me more detail about that?

Sure. Commlinks and Nexi are pretty similar, except Nexi are much larger. The difference is kinda like the one between your home and the cafe down the street; you could probably do a lot of the same things in them, but the cafe can hold more people without getting crowded. Peripheral devices are anything else that's wireless-enabled, which could include your car, your toaster and your gun. Commlinks and Nexi have System, Firewall, Response and Signal ratings. Peripheral devices are typically much simpler, and either use a catch-all Device rating or GM fiat, when they use their own attributes at all.

See Also: Slaving (pg 59 Unwired), Nexi (pg 50 Unwired), Matrix Attributes (pg 221-222 SR4A), Capture Wireless Signal (pg 229, SR4A) and Scanning and Sniffing (pg 246,SR4A).

You shouldn't need to scan for the vehicle. In most civilized places, vehicles are required to have their "com" in either active or passive mode (much like your commlink) so they can broadcast their location to other vehicles and police/etc. This is an important part of the self-driving vehicles of Shadowrun. Even If the vehicle is in hidden mode you will need to scan for it, and if you find a lot of nodes (and you will) look for the one centered on the car. You don't just get a list of nodes in AR, you get them mapped over your field of view, so look for the ones attached to the vehicle. Still, if the vehilce is in hidden mode, it means it likely belongs to someone paranoid, and that may make it more trouble then it's worth to mess with.

Now hacking into the car is as easy as Hacking + Exploit vs Firewall. Make sure you have a nice Stealth program running too, because the car will get to make a minor Anylaze check againts you. Once your hacked in, you will have a user acount on that vehicle. A user acount is enough for you to drive/remote control/order the car's pilot program to drive. Assuming the owner doesn't going looking for it any time soon, that will be enough to take it for a drive. You will get in trouble if the owner reports it stollen, but he might also just order it to come pick him up from work/airport/etc while your using it. To prevent those kinds of issues, you will want to remove the orginal owner's acount on the car. That will require you to either have hacked in with a higher level of access (security or admin) meaning having to blow the Firewall rating away, or you will need to use Edit + Hacking to illegally alter the user listings for the vehicle so it will no longer respond to the orginal owner as a valid user. (IE: Ignore him). Again, do this with a Stealth program running because the car will get to make an anyalze check againts you to notice the hacking. I'd also recomend making a new true acount for yourself on the vehicle, so you can use it without hacking in.

Next up, you will want to prevent the owner from being able to locate the car on the city's street networks... to do that you will need to alter the vehicle id it's broadcasting. This can be done with either a spoof program or by physicaly alterting it's hardware. The trouble here is that the vehicle's plates won't match the Id, so I'd recomend concealing the plates with mud/dirt, removing them, or printing out new plate on a printer. No one will notice this at first, but if someone reports the vehicle missing, the local authorities might check their traffic cams looking for the plate id. Personaly, my rigger characters use camera jammers and morphing plates for these kinds of reasons, but those won't be installed on a car you just stole.

Also look to see if this vehicle has a full grid guide system or not. If it does, turn it off (this may require a hacking + edit check). Don't turn it back on ever again. In fact, replace it with a grid guide override system later, but just leave it off for now.

Now we need to clean our data trail. Clean the vehicle logs so it doesn't show you having hacked in, and so it doesn't show the vehilce having ever belonged to someone else, nor that it's vehicle id has ever been anything other then it's now altered new ID. Unless your an ADMIN on the vehicle, this will be another Hacking + Edit check.

Now that you've hacked the car, removed it's owner's user acount, added one of your own, and then altered the vehicle's broadcast ID and altered or concealed it's plates to match, you can now consider the vehicle mostly yours. It won't respond to it's orginal owner, and it's own system will say it belongs to you. At this point you need to get it's plates really changed over. As a shadow runner I'd recomend you pickup a spoofer chip and morphing licence plate so you can conceal your ID easier.

Of course you do need to worry about any RFID tags on the vehicle. By default the vehicle computer acts as it's lojack... if stollen the owner or authorities could track it anywhere in a matrix coverage zone... that's why you need to spoof it's vehicle ID (or change it with a hardware check) so that it's no longer using that trackable ID. That doesn't change all the other wifi devices in or on the vehicle. It may have parking permits with little RFID chips hanging from the rear view mirror for example. Also, any and all personal belongings in the car are likely to be tagged or wifi enabled, and a smart owner or compitent detective could use those as a way to track down the vehicle. All this you can locate using a Scan program. You'd be searching for hidden nodes. Once you find them, you either need to remove them (like say tossing child seat and related kids toys out the window) or burn them out (tag eraser). All of these tags/devices, by the way, aren't primary meathods of locating a vehicle, and thus won't be an issue until the owner realizes his car is stollen. This may give you a few hours or days depending on the situation.

Your bigger troubles will be if the owner is paranoid. A paranoid owner will have extra stealth and security tags in difficult spots on the vehicle. He will have a higher powered Firewall, with better anyalze, and maybe even IC on the computer. In short, steal a car/vehicle from a common wage slave or other upright citizen. Corp controlled vehicles, fellow runner vehicles, and other appropratly paranoid owners will have vehicles that are much nastier to try and run off with.

The grid guide system, by the way, cover most of the decent neighborhoods in the Seatle Sprawl, and includes vehicle tracking, traffic flow, and traffic cameras. Just because your vehicle doesn't have a grid guide system doesn't mean it's invisible to the grid guide network. The Grid Guide system in a car allows it to draw power from the system, and that's why it's an add-on. As long as you don't have an active grid guide system, you should be ok simply spoofing the vehicle ID... but if someone does a real investigation into the theft of the vehicle, they will likely notice when the vehicle stopped being on the system, and when a new one of the exact same model and color popped onto the system immediatly afterwords. To that end, you will want to drive the car out into the barrens where there isn't any grid guide coverage, and then re-spoof the ID. If the car is unique or rare in model/configuration/color consider having it painted at the same time you change it's plates.