A method for the detection of on-road succeeding vehicles using visual characteristic features like horizontal edges, shadow, symmetry and intensity is proposed. The proposed method uses the prominent horizontal edges along with the shadow under the vehicle to generate an initial estimate of the vehicle-road surface contact. Fast symmetry detection, utilizing the edge pixels, is then performed to detect the presence of vertically symmetric object, possibly vehicle, in the region above the initially estimated vehicle-road surface contact. A window defined by the horizontal and the vertical line obtained from above along with local perspective information provides a narrow region for the final search of the vehicle. A bounding box around the vehicle is extracted from the horizontal edges, symmetry histogram and a proposed squared difference of intensity measure. Experiments have been performed on natural traffic scenes obtained from a camera mounted on the side view mirror of a host vehicle demonstrate good and reliable performance of the proposed method.