Abstract In view of drawbacks in GNSS-dark areas such as forests, tunnel, etc., which cause position results inaccuracy, high-mobility positioning methods using IEEE 802.11p standard in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) should be developed. Accuracy time of arrival (TOA) estimation based ranging model has attracted wide attention as one of the challenges for vehicular collision avoidance system. In this paper, we propose an efficient TOA or ranging estimation method using IEEE 802.11p short preamble in order to mitigate the effect of multipath vehicle measurements and low signal noise ratio (SNR).Firstly, the TOA estimation is performed using auto correlation and cross-correlation. Then, the approach to sum is presented for finding the accurate time offset. Simulation results, in the International Telecommunication Union Vehicle A (ITUA) channel and an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, prove the superiority of proposed algorithm in low SNR conditions and multipath environments.