The problem of information dissemination is researched for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) in this paper, and a contention-based efficient-information perception algorithm (CEiPA) is proposed. The idea of CEiPA is that beacons are delivered over VANET with limited lifetime and efficient information. CEiPA consists of two phases. The first one is initialization phase, during which the count timers Tcycle and Tlocal are set to start beacon delivery while Tcycle is also used to monitor and restart beaconing. The second one is beacon delivery phase. An elaborate distance function is employed to set contention delay for beacons of each vehicle. In this way beacons will be sent in order, which decreases the collision of beacons. Simulation results show that CEiPA enables each beacon to carry more efficient information and spread them over more vehicles with lower network overhead than the periodic beacon scheme. CEiPA is also flexible and scalable because the efficient information threshold it employs is a balance among the freshness of information, network overhead and perception area of a vehicle.