In this paper, we report the first complete version of a multi-hop broadcast protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). Our results clearly show that broadcasting in VANET is very different from routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) due to several reasons such as network topology, mobility patterns, demographics, traffic patterns at different times of the day, etc. These differences imply that conventional ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR and AODV will not be appropriate in VANETs for most vehicular broadcast applications. We identify three very different regimes that a vehicular broadcast protocol needs to work in: i) dense traffic regime; ii) sparse traffic regime; and iii) regular traffic regime. We build upon our previously proposed routing solutions for each regime and we show that the broadcast message can be disseminate efficiently. The proposed design of the distributed vehicular broadcast (DV-CAST) protocol integrates the use of various routing solutions we have previously proposed.