Timely and cost-efficient multi-hop data delivery among vehicles is essential for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), and various routing protocols are envisioned for infrastructure-less vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Generally, when a packet (or a duplicate) is delivered out of the routing path, it will be dropped. However, we observe that these packets (or duplicates) may also be delivered much faster than the packets delivered along the original routing path. In this paper, we propose a novel tree based routing scheme (TBRS) for ultilizing the dropped packets in VANETs. In TBRS, the packet is delivered along a routing tree with the destination as its root. And when the packet is delivered out its routing tree, it won’t be dropt immediately and will be delivered for a while if it can arrive at another branch of the tree. We conduct the extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of TBRS based on the road map of a real city collected from Google Earth. The simulation results show that TBRS can outperform the existing protocols, especially when the network resources are limited. Timely and cost-efficient multi-hop data delivery among vehicles is essential for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), and various routing protocols are envisioned for infrastructure-less vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Generally, when a packet Or a duplicate) is delivered out of the routing path, it will be dropped dropped. However, we observe that these packets (or duplicates) may also be delivered much faster than the packets delivered along the original routing path. In this paper, we propose a novel tree based routing scheme (TBRS) for ultilizing the dropped packets in VANETs. In TBRS, the packet is delivered along a routing tree with the destination as its root. And when the packet is delivered out its routing tree, it will not be dropt immediately and will be delivered for another while if it can arrive at another branch of the tree. We conduct the extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of TBRS based on the road map of a real city collected from Google Earth. The simulation r esults show that TBRS can outperform the existing protocols, especially when the network resources are limited.