In this paper, two variants of the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) scheme for CAN bus are presented. The basic HARQ uses error-correction code based on the Reed- Solomon (RS) technique and the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) method to detect errors. The second scheme uses the cyclic error-correction method instead of the CRC error-detection method to further improve the throughput. Moreover, the second scheme uses no additional bit overhead when compared with the basic HARQ scheme. This paper presents the performance of the proposed schemes using MATLAB and NS2 simulations. Experimental data of error patterns were used for realistic evaluation. The basic HARQ method corrects 100% of error bursts shorter than 7 bits. When the burst length falls between 7 to 10 the scheme corrects between 86% and 56% of the corrupted frames. Network Simulator (NS2) simulations showed that the throughput increased by 92% when the user message size was increased from the standard 64 bits to 512 bits as a result of reduced overhead per user bit.