In this paper, an event-triggered distributed safety-critical control scheme for cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is presented. The approach merges two control actions. In the first block, a nominal controller that guarantees practical consensus of a platoon characterized by linear dynamics, while excluding the Zeno behavior which refers to the occurrence of an infinite number of events within finite time. It exploits a novel communication triggering condition (CTC) where the minimum inter-event times for all vehicles are lower bounded. The second block considers the physical limitations of the vehicles, i. e. it avoids unreasonable accelerations/decelerations, and it integrates safety measures in terms of collision avoidance by exploiting the concept of tunable input-to-state safe control barrier functions (TISSf-CBFs). To enhance the platoon cohesiveness, and to maintain a desired inter-vehicle spacing between the vehicles, a bidirectional communication strategy is utilized. Under this control strategy, acceleration transmissions occur intermittently at specific time instants rather than continuously. In conclusion, the proposed controller’s effectiveness is validated through simulation, where we show a significant reduction in communication under various scenarios.