One of the effective technologies that have been found useful in a number of real-time applications to increase the safety of roadways is called a vehicular ad hoc network, or VANET for short. In spite of the many advantages of the VANET, one of the most difficult aspects of this network is still the creation of an efficient routing protocol. The fact that VANET involves dynamic factors in its routing process makes it a difficult task to do successfully. It is possible to build a wide variety of route selection strategies in order to make efficient use of the available networking resources and to improve the efficacy of the routing. To achieve a higher level of resource utilization within VANET, the development of an efficient routing protocol is an absolute necessity. As a result of this impetus, the purpose of this research is to present an energy efficient hill climbing based red deer algorithm known as EEHC-RDA for use as an optimal route selection technique in VANET. In order to increase both the system's lifetime and its energy efficiency, the EEHC-RDA technique that has been presented prioritizes the selection of the most effective routes to the final destination. In addition, the EEHC-RDA method improves the convergence rate since it combines the mating behaviour of red deer with the hill climbing (HC) ideas. In addition to this, the EEHC-RDA method computes a fitness function for selecting the best possible routes, which takes into account a variety of input factors. In order to show that the EEHC-RDA approach offers a higher level of performance, a broad range of simulations are carried out. The outcomes of these simulations show that the suggested model has an enhanced performance in contrast to the existing methods in terms of a wide variety of different metrics, which demonstrates that the present state of approaches is not optimal.