The presentation demonstrates the workflow using ecu.test from tracetronic on representative automotive validation scenarios. Practical lessons learned from industrial deployment are shared, including reproducibility, interoperability, supplier integration and the reduction of late integration effort. The result is reduced dependence on costly HiL capacity, a consolidated tool landscape, lower integration effort and earlier software defect detection. Beyond the concrete use case, the contribution shows how FMI, its Layered Standards and SSP mature into a foundation for continuous, hardware-independent validation across the entire V-model.