In recent years, the vehicular ad hoc networking (VANET) concept has supported the development of emerging safety related applications for vehicles based on cooperative awareness between vehicles. This cooperative awareness can be achieved by exploiting wireless sensors and technologies to transmit periodic messages to neighboring vehicles. These messages normally contain information regarding vehicles, such as position, speed, distance between vehicles, etc. For the transfer of safety messages, Wi-Fi and the suit of IEEE 802.11p/WAVE protocols were commonly used initially but now cellular-based LTE and 5G are the emerging technologies for VANETs. In this paper, a comparison is performed considering the European ITS-G5 standard, Wi-Fi, LTE and 5G by exchanging safety messages in VANETs. We have exchanged real-time road weather and traffic observation data to evaluate the performance of the aforementioned wireless technologies in terms of successful message delivery probability. Our results reveal that due to weak communication links and the lack of line of sight (LOS) communication for Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) scenarios, Wi-Fi and 802.11p are outperformed by LTE and 5G networks.