This paper presents a real- time detection of on-road succeeding vehicles based on low level edge features and a boosted cascade of Haar-like features. At first, the candidate vehicle location in an image is found by low level horizontal edge and symmetry characteristic of vehicle. Then a boosted cascade of the Haar-like features is applied to the initial hypothesized vehicle location to extract the refined vehicle location. The initial hypothesis generation using simple edge features speeds up the whole detection process and the application of a trained cascade on the hypothesized location increases the accuracy of the detection process. Experimental results on real world road scenario with processing speed of up to 27 frames per second for $720{ imes}480$ pixel images are presented.