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Present automobile development is keenly focused on measures to reduce the CO2 output of vehicles. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) enable grid electricity, which is clean in tail-pipe emissions terms, to be utilised whilst the on-board electrical storage has sufficient charge. MAHLE Powertrain and Protean have jointly developed a plug-in hybrid demonstrator vehicle based on a C-segment passenger car. The vehicle features Protean’s compact direct drive in-wheel motors with integrated inverters on the rear axle and retains the standard gasoline engine, and manual transmission, on the front axle. To support this one-off prototype, a flexible vehicle control unit has been developed, which is easily re-configurable and adaptable to any hybrid vehicle architecture.