The rising number of electronic control units (ECUs) in vehicles and the decreasing time to market have led to the need for advanced methods of calibration. A multi-ECU calibration system was developed based on the explicit calibration protocol (XCP) and J1939 communication protocol to satisfy the need of calibrating multiple ECUs simultaneously. The messages in the controller area network (CAN) are defined in the J1939 protocol. Each CAN node can get its own calibration messages and information from other ECUs, and block other messages by qualifying the CAN messages with priority, source or destination address. The data field of the calibration message is designed with the XCP , with CAN acting as the transport layer. The calibration sessions are setup with the event-triggered XCP driver in the master node and the responding XCP driver in the slave nodes. Mirroring calibration variables from ROM to RAM enables the user to calibrate ECUs online. The application example shows that the multi-ECU calibration system can calibrate multiple ECUs simultaneously, and the main program can also accomplish its calculation and send commands to the actuators in time. By the multi-ECU calibration system, the calibration effort and time can be reduced and the variables in ECU can get a better match with the variables of other ECUs.