Presently, vehicles are not only used for moving from one place to another location but also for various purposes, e.g., location tracking, entertainment, environment monitoring, traffic congestion, smart transportation, and related applications. Moreover, it is possible because of information communication technology. Therefore, we need a communication system to establish a connection between two or more objects on the road networks. However, road-side-units and vehicles communicate with each other in a public environment, and vehicles always change their locality. Thus, vehicle users/systems may face data security issues in this architecture. Recently, Xie et al. suggested an authentication method using identity to deal with reliability, conditional privacy, and integrity in the vehicular ad-hoc networks. However, we identify some security flaws (impersonation, modification, man-in-the-middle, and stolen device) in Xie et al.’s scheme. Thus, we propose an energy-efficient and secure communication using batch verification (ESCBV) protocol to address the present problems of the Xie et al.’s method. Further, we present security proofs to ensure that the suggested method resists different attacks. Moreover, we analyze performance outcomes of the proposed approach to compare with other related schemes, and we notice that the ESCBV system performs better in the implementation time, communication overhead, memory requirement, and energy consumption compared to other related protocols. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.