Performance analysis of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) currently attracts a lot of attention among governments, automobile and automatics manufactures, academia research community, etc. This paper provides a brief overview of VANET-related studies with a strong emphasis to the active-safety provisioning by means of vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In contrast to the already existing large number of simulation studies, only few analytical results for the performance analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle information exchange protocols are published up to now. Some of our recent research results filling this gap are presented.