As the vehicle electronic control technology quickly grows and becomes more sophisticated, a more efficient means than the traditional in-vehicle driving test is required for the design, testing, and tuning of electronic control units (ECU). For this purpose, the hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) scheme is very promising, since significant portions of actual driving test procedures can be replaced by HIL simulation. The HILS incorporates hardware components in the numerical simulation environment, and this yields results with better credibility than pure numerical simulations can offer. In this study, a HILS system has been developed for ESP (Electronic Stability Program) ECUs. The system consists of the hardware component, which that includes the hydraulic brake mechanism and an ESP ECU, the software component, which virtually implements vehicle dynamics with visualization, and the interface component, which links these two parts together. The validity of HIL simulation is largely contingent upon the accuracy of the vehicle model. To account for this, the HILS system in this research used the commercial software CarSim to generate a detailed full vehicle model, and its parameters were set by using design data, SPMD (Suspension Parameter Measurement Device) data, and data from actual vehicle tests. Using the developed HILS system, performance of a commercial ESP ECU was evaluated for a virtual vehicle under various driving conditions. This HILS system, with its reliability, will be used in various applications that include durability testing, benchmarking and comparison of commercial ECUs, and detection of fault and malfunction of ESP ECUs.