Security issues related to vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted great attention recently. In this paper, we propose a privacy preservation authentication scheme (PPAS) for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication environments in VANETs. The authentication process of PPAS is performed locally without returning to the trust authority (TA) to reduce the authentication latency. Moreover, PPAS satisfies the following security requirements: anonymity, location untraceability, mutual authentication to prevent server spoofing attack, stolen-verified attack resistance, forgery attack resistance, no clock synchronization problem, modification attack resistance, replay attack resistance, and session key agreement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide a lightweight authentication scheme (i.e., only uses the symmetric cryptography, an XOR operation, and a hash function) with high security property in V2I communication networks.