Today many safety-critical applications are based on distributed systems where several computing nodes exchange information via suitable network interconnections. An example of this class of applications is the automotive field, where developers are exploiting the CAN protocol for implementing the communication backbone. The capability of accurately evaluating the dependability properties of such a kind of systems is today a major concern. In this paper we present a new environment that can be fruitfully exploited to assess the effects of faults in CAN-based networks. The entire network is emulated via an ad-hoc hardware/software system that allows easily evaluating the effects of faults in all the network components, namely the network nodes, the protocol controllers and the transmission channel. In this paper, we report a detailed description of the environment we set-up and we present some preliminary results we gathered to assess the soundness of the proposed approach.