In the era of autonomous driving, it is essential to have the multiple antennas in the automobiles to cover the various applications. Therefore, a fractal multiband antenna is the one of the potential solutions to cover the multi-operation within the limited space and also for the integration along with keeping the aesthetic appearance of the modern passenger car. In this article, a fractal antenna is presented for the multiband applications covering frequencies in C- and X-band. The design exhibits the gain of 4.5 dB and impedance bandwidth of 500 MHz with radiation efficiency of 80%. For enhancing the channel capacity and data rate, the proposed design is extended into 2-element multi–input–multi–output (MIMO) antenna array with excellent isolation of more than − 20 dB and expressing other diversity parameters with an improvement of gain upto 8.4 dB in the desired frequency band.