In view of recent developments in fuel cell electric vehicle powertrain systems, Internet-based geographically distributed test platforms for fuel cell electric vehicle powertrain systems become a development and validation trend. Due to the involvement of remote connection and the Internet, simulation with connected models can suffer great uncertainty because of packet loss. Such a test platform, including packet loss characteristics, was built using MATLAB/Simulink for use in this paper. The simulation analysis results show that packet loss affects the stability of the whole test system. The impact on vehicle speed is mainly concentrated in the later stage of simulation. Aiming at reducing the effect of packet loss caused by Internet, a robust model predictive compensator was designed. Under this compensator, the stability of the system is greatly improved compared to the system without a compensator. INDEX TERMS Fuel cell electric vehicle, powertrain system, Internet-based distributed test platform, packet loss, robust model prediction compensator.