A half-car model of semi-active suspension systems with 4-DOF was established. An innovative fuzzy hybrid control strategy considering both ride quality and road-friendliness was developed. For deeply verifying the application of the proposed control strategy in real vehicles, a platform of hardware-in-the-loop was built for evaluating the proposed control strategy of semi-active suspension systems using a self-designed electronic control unit based on Freescale MC9S12XDP512 microcontroller and Matlab/Real-time Windows Target toolbox. A series of hardware-in-the-loop simulation were conducted by using the platform. It showed that compared with skyhook control strategy and groundhook control strategy, HIL-based fuzzy hybrid control strategy can make a balance between vehicle ride and road-friendly and had the application feasibility.