Spectrum sensing is one of the core functionality of a cognitive radio system. Accurate identification of primary system signal can prevent interference and provide maximum protection to licensed users. However, many challenges associated with spectrum sensing still exist. Examples include shadowing, multipath fading of the primary user signal, hidden primary user problem and many more. To circumvent the challenges faced by sensing device, the cooperative decision from participating devices has been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we suggest a cooperative decision based on support vector machine (SVM) for spectrum sensing in vehicular communication environment to mitigate shadowing and multipath fading. Spectrum sensing can be formulated as a pattern recognition problem with sensing results grouped into two distinct classes corresponding to the presence or absence of a primary user signal. Therefore, we employ SVM at the fusion centre to classify the primary signal correctly. The roadside units along the highway are selected to act as the fusion centre where sensing decision is made. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using receiver operation characteristic curves in MATLAB. We compare the probability of detection for the proposed cooperative scheme to hard fusion rule. The simulation result shows that SVM based cooperative decision performed better than hard fusion rule.With an increase in the number of emerging applications and services developed for wireless technologies, demand for bandwidth has been growing steadily. For example, it is envisioned that by 2020, there will be more than 50 billion devices connected to the Internet mostly through wireless communication [3]. This poses a major challenge on the already scarce radio frequency spectrum which is a finite resource. For instance, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA has allocated almost all the channels in the communicable frequency bands to licensed users [4]. The unlicensed spectrum channels are reserved for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) usage and shared among different radio technologies such as Bluetooth, WiFi, Microwave ovens and emerging radio technologies. ITS applications have been allocated 75MHz at the 5.9GHz band for dedicated short range communication (DSRC) for V2V and V2I communications [5]. The 75MHz is divided into 7 channels with 10MHz each. 5MHz is reserved as guard band channel. Regardless, these channels can become congested, particularly during peak hours or accident scenarios, when the number of vehicles contending for the same channels increases [6]. In such situations, the delivery of delay sensitive safety and emergency messages becomes difficult.