With the widespread use of heavy-duty engineering vehicles, the need of display terminal for the vehicle increases rapidly. Because of the special functional requirements, it is very difficult to design the display terminal for developers. At the same time, the cost of designing display terminal is very expensive. It is significant that the customizable display terminal can be rapidly designed. In this paper, a method of CAN bus display terminal design for heavy-duty engineering vehicle is presented. Embedded rapid customized technology is employed in the design process. Also the custom embedded development platform and the application software for the display terminal were designed. The embedded development platform includes hardware components such as CAN bus interface, PowerPC processor and CoDeSys programming environment. Based on the platform, the application software is designed to transmit data on CAN bus and record the running state of vehicle. The developed program is used for the purpose of real-time state parameters transmission and storage, dynamic graphical display, modification of the interactive system. The application practice result shows that rapid customization design technology is valid for heavy-duty engineer vehicle design application, and improvement for the design of embedded display terminal is discussed based on the effect of practical application.