This paper presents an implementation of the IEEE 802.11p physical layer, using the open source ath5k driver, and conducts and analyzes experiments in both line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) conditions. Simulation of the same scenarios is also carried out with proper channel models and both results are compared. The study shows that, in LOS, vehicles can communicate over more than 1Km which, in highway scenarios, can significantly decrease the communication gaps between clus- ters of vehicles. In NLOS scenarios, the communication range falls to the order of hundreds of meters. Although in LOS scenarios it is possible to model the vehicular communications with joint propagation models and a statistical channel model including fading and other effects, this work shows that the same is not true for NLOS communications. In these scenarios, the available models are either not accurate or very computationally expensive, thus not being suitable for network-level simulation.