Adhesively bonded lap is used extensively in the manufacture of automotive structures. In order to explore the strength of the structures with lap joints, the adhesively bonded single lap joints with differential bondline thickness were tested in tension loading which creates shear across the bondline. Various parameters were investigated such as the bondline thickness and spew fillet. The equivalent stress was obtained through finite element analysis to define the effect of spew fillet for thick bondline, which helped to get the conclusions that strength of single lap was decreasing as bondline thickness increasing and spew fillet could reduce the peak value of stress so as to enhance the strength of lap joints. HartSmith factor was used to compute the tension load of single lap joints, which helped to get conservative prediction of strength.