With the increasing demands of various applications on vehicles, such as road condition sensing, traffic management, location-based services, and others both academic researchers and automotive industries pay much attention to Vehicular Networks. Due to the rapid change of network topology and intermittent connection, it is a big challenge to satisfy the service requests from a large number of vehicular users. Further, network faults disrupt communication among vehicles, which affects the reliability and timely data delivery in vehicular networks. In this paper, for timely and reliable data transmission, an efficient data forwarding scheme for vehicular networks is proposed. Also, the paper addresses three types of network faults along with the data forwarding issue by selecting an optimal route with a higher probability of connectivity and lower experienced delay. The proposed scheme detects the faults dynamically and takes necessary actions to recover from the fault. Extensive simulation has been performed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Compared to the existing AODV- D approach and SRCP scheme, the proposed scheme attains better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and control overhead.