The aim of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is to automate the interactions among vehicles and infrastructure to accomplish high levels of safety measures, comfort, and competence in vehicular communication. To utilize the future trends of increasing traffic safety and efficiency in ITS, integrating vehicles and infrastructures with the cooperative vehicular technique will be the feasible solution. In order to demonstrate the importance of cooperative communication in vehicular networks, a spectral efficient architecture has been proposed for cooperative centralized and distributed spectrum sensing in vehicular networks. We discuss the possibilities of Cognitive Radio in the cooperative vehicular environment. In order to exhibit cooperative vehicular networks, hardware modules are designed for a vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to infrastructure and infrastructure to infrastructure communications. Furthermore, quantitative analysis is made in order to calculate the energy optimization, connectivity failure probability and traffic management in cooperative vehicular networks. In addition, we test the results of the cooperative vehicular network by simulating it in NS2. In this respect, we have considered three different cases, Emergency vehicles, VIP vehicles, and normal vehicles. It is inferred from the results that end-to-end delay for emergency vehicles in the cooperative environment is considerably less as compared to VIP and normal vehicles.