This paper proposes a vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocol for cooperative collision warning. Emerging wireless technologies for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications such as DSRC [1] are promising to dramatically reduce the number of fatal roadway accidents by providing early warnings. One major technical challenge addressed in this paper is to achieve low-latency in delivering emergency warnings in various road situations. Based on a careful analysis of application requirements, we design an effective protocol, comprising congestion control policies, service differentiation mechanisms and methods for emergency warning dissemination. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves low latency in delivering emergency warnings and efficient bandwidth usage in stressful road scenarios.