This paper offers an empirical study of the impact of the way how the distance between two nodes is measured by a geographical routing protocol for VANETs in order to take its forwarding decision. The distance equations used in this work are obtained by setting the order parameter of the Minkowski distance function. Simulation results from the topology of a real city indicate that the use of dominant distance can improve some classical performance metrics like the packet delivery ratio, average number of hops or end-to-end packet delay.