The gap between technology readiness level in Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) and its adoption and deployment has caused a phenomenon where at least two types of network access technologies have to coexist. Furthermore, for the case of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Intelligent Transport Systems protocols, work is being completed in Release 2 of the specification while Release 1 deployments are still underway. This, coupled with industry and consumer trends in the vehicle industry, is bound to cause a scenario where fully C-ITS-enabled vehicles have to coexist with non-C-ITS road users and, at the very least, with different versions of C-ITS. In this paper, we analyze the performance in terms of efficiency and safety of two releases of the ETSI GeoNetworking protocol and we discuss possible paths to tackle the upcoming compatibility and coexistence problems.