Vehicular communication plays an important role in recent days and IEEE 802.11p is a major recent standard for vehicular communication. As it reuses earlier wireless local area network (WLAN) standards designed mainly for relatively stationary indoor operation, channel estimation becomes a particularly challenging problem in the vehicular communication environment. Existing channel estimation methods either are deficient in performance or require relatively high latency to achieve better performance, unless additional pilot signals are introduced. We propose a design that addresses these issues. One aspect of the proposed method is that it uses the short preamble symbols, in addition to using the long preamble symbols, to effect a better initial channel estimate. Another aspect is to make use of the temporal correlation of channel responses across close-by symbols. Simulation in fading multipath vehicular channel shows vastly superior performance of the proposed method compared to existing ones in higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).