This paper is concerned with event-triggered cooperative control of a platoon of connected vehicles via vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). To reduce communications among vehicles, we introduce a hybrid event-triggered transmission mechanism based on both time elapsed and state error. The effect of time-varying transmission delay and communication energy constraint can be also taken into account in the system modeling and design procedures. The on-board sensors use different power levels to transmit information resulting in different packet loss rates. The vehicular platoon system is proved to be exponentially mean-square stable under the hybrid event-triggering scheme and a constant time headway spacing policy. A framework for co-design of the hybrid event triggering scheme and the output feedback controller is given to guarantee platoon stability and spacing-error convergence along the stream. Numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.