Abstract In the recent years, emission norms are becoming more stringent due to increased environmental effects of the fossil fuels used in vehicles. The need for obtaining less polluting and more fuel efficient vehicles has paved the way for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs). The performance of an HEV relies on the effective usage of the two power sources (ICE and electric motor). The aim is to develop a control strategy to optimize the torque split between the power sources. The road grade has a considerable effect on the overall performance of the vehicle. The optimization of torque splitting is done by acquiring the road grade information with the help of Geographic Information System (GIS) maps. The approach makes use of the Adaptive fuzzy logic in which the output torque of the IC Engine is computed based on the battery State Of Charge (SOC) constraints, driver demand and road grade. In this paper, the design, implementation and testing of the adaptive fuzzy logic based strategy using real world elevation data are presented.