The growth of hybrid and batterypowered electric vehicles requires new development strategies. The changes in the drive train and energy storage systems have an important impact on the automobile. The main changes can be found in reduced cruising range, new engine characteristics, reduced sound emissions, new charging infrastructure and times, driver information systems, as well as new design procedures for innovative interior concepts. From the customer point of view, new technologies often give rise to suspicion. Thus, it becomes important to integrate the driver in the early development process to obtain subjective feedback in terms of functionality and driver acceptance. In this article, a modular and flexible architecture for the development of automotive systems is presented. The central component is a driving simulator architecture, which allows the simulation of different electric or semi-electric vehicles in real time. This real time capability allows the integration of the driver as well as real technical components like the battery system (hardware in the loop) in the simulation. This facilitates driving a virtual electric vehicle with the real target propulsion system. From the results, optimizations of the system can be carried out with respect to human perception. Two virtual test tracks, one highway section between the campus of the University of Duisburg-Essen and an urban route in Cologne, are designed in the simulator. Therefore, data from Google and NASA satellite images are processed to generate the virtual reality for the simulator. The results in terms of energy consumption, which results from the virtual test drives, can be compared to standard drive cycles. Furthermore, the impact of new driver information systems and the characteristics of the electrified drive train on the human driver can be studied.