Abstract: To brake through the limitation of the traditional methods of automobile product development, the contribution of analytical target cascading in automobile product development was studied. The method of analytical target cascading was applied to the electric vehicle development. The design problem of the electric vehicle was formulated as a two-level optimization problem: the vehicle level and the sub-system level. At the vehicle level, the core parameters of driving motor, battery, transmission, and final drive were determined by solving a multi-objective constrained optimization problem, aimed to achieve optimized vehicle tractive performance and energy consumption. At the subsystem level, the parameters of the final drives driving gear and driven gear were optimized to make the ratio of final drive as close to the target value cascaded from vehicle level as possible. The results show that the vehicle performance and subsystem level design can be optimized currently.