The dedicated short range communication (DSRC) standard (also known as IEEE 802.11p) can be used to enable a number of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless radio communication based active safety and telematics applications. In this paper, we briefly document various experimental measurement scenarios and characterize performance of the DSRC standard based radio modules in ldr Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) wireless channel ldr Line-of-sight, no-vehicle-traffic, street road environment ldr Line-of-sight, parking lot environment with moderate-to- dense (surrounding) vehicle density ldr Line-of-sight, freeway environment with low-to-moderate (surrounding) vehicle density The wireless channel models, derived from performance statistics for above mentioned experimental measurement environments, have been incorporated into a DSRC wireless network simulator, and are being used to quantitatively characterize the large-scale network performances (and functional feasibilities) of several V2V, DSRC wireless communication standard based active safety and telematics applications.