Wireless vehicular communications have been identified as one of the most important Intelligent Transportation System technologies to be developed in the coming years, from a safety as well as an energy efficiency point of view. Several standards definitions, hardware developments, research projects, use cases definitions and field operational tests are currently under deployment in order to accelerate the market availability of this technology. Nevertheless, though the possible applications of vehicular communications are defined, there is a lack of availability of completely functional communication technology to support these applications. Issues like the adaptation of communication technologies to run in a massive high speed mobile environment, the behaviour of Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) in multihop mesh mode or routing algorithms for reliable V2V and V2I data transmission are currently open research areas. In this paper we present an evaluation of V2V and V2I prototypes based on wireless sensor mesh networks, tested in real vehicles with real communication hardware. This paper opens up a frame to solve some of the present deficiencies of vehicular communications and enable the possibility of testing safety applications in real VANET situations.