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Cooperative driving is a promising paradigm to improve traffic efficiency and safety. In congested traffic scenarios, such cooperation allows for safe maneuvering and driving with small inter-vehicle spatial gaps. The vehicles involved coordinate their movements in real-time and continuously update each other about their maneuver execution status by means of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, unreliable V2X communication increases the Age of Information (AoI) of vehicles&#x2019; status updates, posing a challenge in situations where emergency braking is required during cooperative maneuvering. To address the interplay between unreliable V2X communication and the resulting impact on traffic safety, we introduce a so-called <italic>safety time function</italic>, specifically designed for cooperative driving use-cases. The <italic>safety time function</italic> provides the time available for a vehicle to react to an unexpected event of another vehicle &#x2013; such as emergency braking to avoid a collision. We provide a computationally efficient algorithm for the computation of safety time functions, which allows for efficient <italic>and</italic> safe cooperative maneuver planning &#x2013; even in dense traffic scenarios with many vehicles involved. We show the applicability of our proposed <italic>safety time function</italic> based on the assessed communication quality for IEEE 802.11p-based V2X communication to meet safety constraints in dense vehicular traffic.