Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) becomes more popular in industry, academia and government. However, Typical VANET is challenged by high speed mobility and insufficient spectrum resources over congested scenarios. To address those serious problems, some articles have introduced Cognitive Radio (CR) technology into VANET and formed CR-VANET. In this article, we propose an overview of CR-VANET by exploring different architectures and features. Moreover, we provide taxonomy of state-of-the-art papers in this emerging field and the key articles are well analyzed respectively. In addition, we illustrate both research and application frameworks of CR-VANET based on our works, and propose some open research issues for inspiring future work.