Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is still a challenging issue due to intrinsic characteristics — especially limited resources and high mobility- of these mobile networks. The AODV routing protocol is one of the applied protocols in such networks since it can adapts to network continuous topology changes. Nevertheless, its performance may suffer from high frequency VANET dynamics as they cause frequent link failures. In this paper, we present a proposal to enhance the operation of the native AODV routing protocol by the Route Life Time (RLT) mechanism so designing a novel VANET routing protocol baptized the RLT-AODV. This protocol can adapt rapidly to continuous network changes thereby maintaining the established routes as long as possible. We carried a performance evaluation of AODV-RLT by means of simulation by regards to the following metrics: network throughput, round-trip time (RTT), transmission overhead (TOH) and the successfully packets delivered ratio (SPDR). We show that the AODV-RLT protocol is able to achieve stable network throughput compared to AODV which suffers from frequent disconnections. Besides, the measured RTT for AODV-RLT is half of that obtained with AODV. In addition, AODV-RLT protocol yields a decrease of 81% and an increase of about 13% in the TOH and the SPDR respectively compared to AODV routing protocol. Given these results we proceeded to apply the RLT technique on the DSR routing protocol and we observed that DSR-RLT performs higher network throughput than AODV-RLT.