Controller area networks (CANs) have been designed for multiplexing communication between electronic control units (ECUs) in vehicles and many high-level industrial control applications. When a CAN bus is overloaded by a large number of ECUs connected to it, both the waiting time and the error probability of the data transmission are increased. Thus, it is desirable to reduce the CAN frame length, since the duration of data transmission is proportional to the frame length. In this paper, we present a CAN message compression method to reduce the CAN frame length. Experimental results indicate that CAN transmission data can be compressed by up to 81.06% with the proposed method. By using an embedded test board, we show that 64-bit engine management system (EMS) CAN data compression can be performed within 0.16 ms; consequently, the proposed algorithm can be successfully used in automobile applications.