Automakers are trying to make vehicles more intelligent and safe by embedding processors which can be used to implement ldquoby-wirerdquo applications for taking smart decisions on the road or assisting the driver in doing the same. Given this proliferation, there is a need to minimize the computing power required without affecting the performance and safety of the applications. The latter is especially important since these by-wire applications are distributed and real-time in nature and involve deadline bound computations on critical data gathered from the environment. These applications have stringent requirements on the freshness of data items and completion time of the tasks. Our work studies one such safety-related automotive application namely, automatic merge control (AMC) which ensures safe vehicle maneuver in the region where two or more roads intersect.As our contributions, we (i) propose two merge algorithms for amc: head of the lane (HoL) and all feasible sequences (AFS) (ii) demonstrate how DSRC-based wireless communication protocol can be leveraged for the development of AMC (iii) present a real-time approach towards designing AMC by integrating mode-change and real-time repository concepts for reducing the processing power requirements and (iv) provide a scheduling strategy to meet AMC taskspsila timing requirements. Simulations and implementation on robotic vehicular platforms demonstrate the advantages of using our approach for constructing merge-by-wire systems.