The aim for conducting this study is to bring optimistic and heuristic techniques of routing protocol at one place as a survey. In vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), a routing protocol has some significant challenges. In literature a variety of techniques have been used to tackle these issues. This study provides the comparative analysis of the more optimistic and heuristic techniques: Ant colony optimization, greedy forwarding, fuzzy logic, delay tolerance and clustering techniques. These are compared to find which technique is better, discusses advantages and disadvantages of routing protocols. Finally, we concludes the paper by pointing out some open issues and possible directions of future research related to VANET routing.