One of the most promising and critical application of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is improvement of the road traffic safety. Currently there is a growing belief that putting an 802.11-like radio into road vehicles could help the drivers to travel more safely. Although research in this field is in preliminary stage, some simple implementations are quite promising; to the best of our knowledge there is no comprehensive feasibility study in the literature. So, as a first step, in this paper we investigate the feasibility of beacon safety message dissemination in VANETs through extensive simulation study. Vehicles are supposed to issue these massages periodically to announce other vehicles about their current situation and use received messages for preventing possible unsafe situations. We evaluate the performance of some simple protocols by the means of quality of service (QoS) metrics like delivery rate and delay and take special attention to reliability and fairness requirements of safety applications. Our results show in spite of global interest, safety applications in VANETs encounter severe challenges which should be addressed properly in the future research. We believe that to become a reality, this issue needs much more research, industry and government support.