Abstract. The paper presents implementation of PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) to ANN-based speed controller tuning. Selected learning parameters are optimized according to the control objective function. A battery electric vehicle is considered as a potential plant for an adaptive speed controller. The need for adaptivity in the control algorithm is justified by variations of a total weight of the vehicle. A sizable section of the paper deals with selection of a combined objective function able to effectively evaluate the quality of a solution.