Experimental and numerical evaluation is performed on a square hollow aluminium column, an aluminium honeycomb filled column, an aluminium column filled with combined carbon fibre and an aluminium honeycomb at constant velocity of 3.06 mm/s to analyze the axial crushing phenomenon at low speed axial loads. To validate experimental outputs, numerical simulation is performed using PAMCRASH explicit finite element code. The effects of honeycomb core and carbon fibre reinforced aluminium honeycomb were analysed experimentally and numerically. A decent agreement between experimental and numerical results is observed. The effects of deformation modes and force-displacement curves on these different structural columns were studied. Experimental and numerical results showed the square aluminium column filled with carbon fibre reinforced aluminium honeycomb was the most crashworthy combination, where the maximum increase of energy absorption, specific energy absorption and crush force efficiency were up to 60.6%, 27.8% and 17.4% respectively, compared with bare aluminium hollow column. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd