A forward collision warning (FCW) system is important for avoiding rear-end collisions. When the front vehicle slows down or the risk of rear-end collision increases, the FCW system sends a warning. However, if the warning is provided too late, the following vehicle may not have enough time to stop or slow down smoothly. Here, we propose a new FCW system that detects the driving intention of the front vehicle to provide earlier warning than previously used systems. The proposed FCW system consists of three steps. First, the driving intention of the front vehicle is determined by the driving intention recognition module. Second, the driving intention and other driving parameters of the front vehicle are transmitted to the following vehicle using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Finally, this information and the driving parameters of the following vehicle are used to determine the potential collision risk by the FCW module located in the second vehicle. To evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a simulation test based on PreScan (commercial software provided by TASS international) and actual road tests in various driving scenarios. The simulation test results demonstrated that the correct warning rate of the proposed system was 97.67%, which was 6.34% higher than that of the system with a fixed time-to-collision (TTC) threshold. The real vehicle test results showed that the proposed system was able to provide earlier warnings than the TTC-based system. The timely warning rate, i.e., the ratio of the number of warnings at the beginning of braking to the total number of warnings was 93.33%. The proposed system proved effective for providing early warning to the following vehicle under different driving conditions of the front vehicle. INDEX TERMS Collision warning, driving intention, hidden Markov model, V2V communication.