The potential of infrastructureless vehicular ad hoc networks for providing safety and nonsafety applications is quite significant. The topology of VANETs in urban, suburban, and rural areas can exhibit fully connected, fully disconnected, or sparsely connected behavior, depending on the time of day or the market penetration rate of wireless communication devices. In this article we focus on highway scenarios, and present the design and implementation of a new distributed vehicular multihop broadcast protocol, that can operate in all traffic regimes, including extreme scenarios such as dense and sparse traffic regimes. DV-CAST is a distributed broadcast protocol that relies only on local topology information for handling broadcast messages in VANETs. It is shown that the performance of the proposed DV-CAST protocol in terms of reliability, efficiency, and scalability is excellent.