Not only are you less likely to crash -- you're less likely to cause a crash ten cars behind you.

This diagram changed how I think about following distance: https://entropicthoughts.com/keep-a-safe-following-distance

I find this diagram _incredibly_ hard to read. I’m pretty sure I understand the phenomenon he’s describing — without safe following distances, car n+1 must break more aggressively than car n in order to avoid a collision, so given a long enough chain of non-safe followers, a collision is guaranteed. But either I am dumber than I’d like, or that plot is terrible.