IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technology is currently an emerging research topic in both industry and academia. Respective spectrum allocation of 10 MHz channels in the 5.9 GHz band for USA and Europe allows considering inter-vehicle transmission of a live video information as a basis, which enables a new class of safety and infotainment automotive applications such as road video surveillance. This paper is first of its kind where such a video transmission system is developed and experimentally validated. We propose a low-complexity unequal packet loss protection and rate control algorithms for a scalable video coding based on the three-dimensional discrete wavelet transform. We show that in comparison with a scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard the new codec is less sensitive to packet losses, has less computational complexity and provides comparable performance in case of unequal packet loss protection. It is specially designed to cope with severe channel fading typical for dynamic vehicular environments and has a low complexity, making it a feasible solution for real-time automotive surveillance applications. Extensive measurements obtained in realistic city traffic scenarios demonstrate that good visual quality and continuous playback is possible when the moving vehicle is in the radius of 600 meters from the roadside unit. ©2014 IEEE