Cellular vehicular-to-everything (C-V2X) systems offer the potential for improving road safety, in part through the exchange of periodic basic safety messages (BSMs) between nearby vehicles. The reliability and latency of these messages is a key metric. Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) retransmissions are one technique used to this end. However, HARQ may come at the expense of consuming the limited available wireless resources, especially in highly congested scenarios. This paper studies BSM transmission latency and reliability when HARQ retransmissions are used with the semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) in C-V2X transmission mode 4. We do so through extensive system-level simulations that closely follow the SPS process. Furthermore, we provide an analytical model for the tail behavior of the BSM latency distribution with HARQ retransmissions that is a good approximation to the simulation results. Our study reveals the impact of several deployment settings (e.g., bandwidth configurations and vehicle density).