Recent technological developments have resulted in the extensive usage of VANET for intelligent transportation and road safety applications. With a road safety application, reliable delivery of altering messages to avoid road accidents is one of the key and highly challenging requirements. This paper proposes an adaptive and reliable communication method called Adaptive Byte Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (AB-HARQ) to improve reliability of safety messages transmitted over VANET. To ensure recoverability of the errors in transmitted packets over VANET, error recovery probability of AB-HARQ method is calculated as Precovery . The effectiveness of the proposed AB-HARQ method in assuring reliable data transmission for VANET is evaluated using simulation studies with results of the simulations given in this paper. This evaluation has identified the effectiveness of AB-HARQ in having higher success probability and error recovery probability when compared with HARQ method.