Current development trends for automotive products are driven by time to market reduction, cost optimization, and quality improvement. Dual to these business constraints are demands for innovation and safety conformance which impose increasing complexity on embedded systems. To address these challenges impacting software and hardware to improve system dependability, new methodology and tools need to be set-up. The use of representative virtual platforms combining speed and accuracy allows earlier software development, improved system testing, and fault injection analysis, with a high potential for reuse of system IPs (including both hardware and software). In this paper, we will present investigation on new methods and associated results using a simplified virtual platform to test a powertrain application.