Due to some nonlinear factors and time delay in electronic throttle, the opening of electronic throttle is difficult to control. For overcoming these difficulties, in this paper a fuzzy adaptive PID controller is designed for an electronic throttle control system. The model of electronic throttle control system is built based on Matlab/Simulink and realized with a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system, which is based on MACS565. Simulation research and experiment results show that, compared with PID control system, the fuzzy adaptive PID control system, has some advantages. The all performance index with the fuzzy adaptive PID control is better than that of the PID control.