Worst-case-based timing verification for the controller area network (CAN) has been the bottleneck to efficient use of its bandwidth. Especially, this inefficiency comes from the worst-case transmission error rate (WCTER) when transmission errors are accounted for. To alleviate this inefficiency, we propose a runtime adaptation scheme, error-adaptive CAN (EACAN). EACAN observes the behavior of transmission errors at runtime, and reconfigures the message period based on the observation to meet the timing-failure requirement. We experimentally evaluate the bandwidth utilization of both EACAN-and WCTER-based verification, showing that the former improves the bandwidth utilization by 14% over the latter.