  Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication networks enable safety applications
via periodic broadcast of Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) or \textit{safety
beacons}. Beacons include time-critical information such as sender vehicle's
location, speed and direction. The vehicle density may be very high in certain
scenarios and such V2V networks suffer from channel congestion and undesirable
level of packet collisions; which in turn may seriously jeopardize safety
application reliability and cause collision risky situations. In this work, we
perform experimental analysis of safety application reliability (in terms of
\textit{collision risks}), and conclude that there exists a unique beacon rate
for which the safety performance is maximized, and this rate is unique for
varying vehicle densities. The collision risk of a certain vehicle is computed
using a simple kinematics-based model, and is based on \textit{tracking error},
defined as the difference between vehicle's actual position and the perceived
location of that vehicle by its neighbors (via most-recent beacons).
Furthermore, we analyze the interconnection between the collision risk and two
well-known network performance metrics, \textit{Age of Information} (AoI) and
\textit{throughput}. Our experimentation shows that AoI has a strong
correlation with the collision risk and AoI-optimal beacon rate is similar to
the safety-optimal beacon rate, irrespective of the vehicle densities, queuing
sizes and disciplines. Whereas throughput works well only under higher vehicle
densities.
