The existing pre-production ECU is very often available as a very economical rapid prototyping hardware. The advantage – besides cost savings – is that existing I/O may be used, and protocol stack elements are available, e.g. diagnostics, XCP/CCP and/or network management.
On projects with new controller platforms, evaluation boards are the natural choice. The board is easily accessed by XCP. Furthermore, the cost-free Vector XCP driver may be used. Then the Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder can be used to generate the code with XCP driver for the evaluation board.