Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are considered one of the most critical infrastructures. For wireless communication ITS uses communications links based on Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) in Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) systems, which is a promising technology to improve traffic safety and reduce highway fatalities. Much research has focused on supporting WAVE safety applications, which depend on many message types. Most important to safety applications is the Basic Safety Message (BSM) as defined in the SAE J2735 Message Set Dictionary Standard. We investigate the survivability of this message exchange, as the industry is moving to the implementation phase, particularly due to the criticality of the system. Therefore fault-tolerance and survivability considerations have to be designed into the system, rather than addressed in an add-on fashion. In this paper we will first give required information introduced by different standards related to this topic. Then we will investigate data reliability of safety application message exchanges for selected scenarios. Finally we propose survivability solutions based on dissimilarity and message redundancy, which only rely on the existing standards.