The increase in capacity demand for vehicular communication is generating interest among researchers. The standard spectra allocated to VANET tend to be saturated and are no longer enough for real-time applications. Millimeter-wave is a potential candidate for VANET applications. However, millimeter-wave is susceptible to pathloss and fading, which degrade system performance. Beamforming, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and diversity techniques are being employed to minimize throughput, reliability and data rate issues. This paper presents a tractable channel model for VANET in which system performance degradation due to error is addressed by concatenated Alamouti space-time block coding (ASTBC) and Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) coding. Two closed-form approximations of bit error rate (BER), one for BCH in Rayleigh fading and the second for BCH with ASTBC, are derived. These expressions comprise SNR and code rate and can be utilized in designing VANET architectures. The results show that the BER using concatenated ASTBC and BCH outmatches the conventional BER ASTBC expression. The analytical results are compared with numerical results, thereby showing the accuracy of our closed-form expressions. The performance of the proposed expressions is evaluated using different code rates.