Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an ad hoc network system built on the idea of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), where individual vehicles are linked to one another using wireless technology. However, the Network performance is affected by the routing problems, like high message latency, regular route interruptions, and inconsistent energy usage. To solve these issues a novel Bacteria foraging Optimized Self Secure based Rout(e)ing (BOSS-ROUTE) has been proposed for self-secure routing in VANET to find the secured optimal path. Optimization is the process of determining the optimal inputs to achieve the highest or lowest output at the lowest possible cost. Bacterial Foraging Optimization is able to find a much better spread of solutions and faster routing convergence. The suggested approach improves the energy efficiency of the VANET by finding optimal path to determine the best course of action. The proposed approach was implemented on NS2 simulator. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed using measures such as network delay, energy efficiency, throughput and packet delivery ratio. The observational findings shows that the BOSS-ROUTE achieves an end-to-end delay of 1.5 sec, whereas existing CORA, AODV-OLSR, ECBLTR technique achieves 3.0s, 3.7s and 4.5 s, respectively.