With the rapid development of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications (V2X communications), reliable and low-complexity cooperative communication techniques are becoming more and more important due to the requirements of signal reliability and transmission delay for vehicles. Therefore, in this paper, an estimated relaying scheme based on soft information is proposed for cooperative vehicular networks, named by estimate-and-forward (EF) strategy. The proposed EF relay forwards the unconstrained minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimate of the received signal at the relay node (vehicle/infrastructure) to the destination node (vehicle/infrastructure), which outperforms amplify-and-forward (AF) in terms of performance, and achieves lower complexity than decode-and-forward (DF). Therefore, the proposed EF relay achieves a better trade-off between performance and complexity compared to the conventional AF and DF. Simulation results confirm the advantages of the proposed EF for cooperative vehicular networks.