The use of aluminium in aerospace structures is predominantly high for being one of the best candidates to achieve light weight with sufficient crashworthiness characteristics. This paper supports the study of aluminium-based vehicle crashworthiness through an aluminium space frame scaled model. Within the limitations of the availability of the extruded tubes, the current study reports about correlation of physical testing and simulation practice along with the visualisation of the crush behaviour of scaled model. An in-house Impact Testing Machine (ITM) is used for testing of the scaled vehicle model. The use ITM is justified using an extruded aluminium tube impact testing and its correlation with finite element simulation. With this confidence the same procedure was used for carrying impact test on scaled vehicle model. The results from physical test and simulation were correlated satisfactorily supporting the simulation procedure. The test results also helped in visualising the crush space behaviour of the vehicle side structure and the impact force paths. These insights were further used in full vehicle design and simulations practice. Thus a vehicle structure designed similar to that of the scaled model could indicate aluminium as good candidate for light weight crashworthy vehicle design application. Finally, this paper summarises a systematic procedure of gaining insights from the testing and simulation scaled models to full scale structural design.