The invention relates to a virtual programmable engineering vehicle instrument system based on a CAN (controlled area network) bus. The system comprises an embedded single-chip; a signal input end of the embedded single-chip is respectively connected with four paths of configurable analog signal input circuits, six paths of switching value input processing circuits, a rotation speed signal input processing circuit, a key input processing circuit and a power supply voltage range automatic selection circuit. By the virtual programmable engineering vehicle instrument system based on the CAN bus, through an embedded computer technology, a display panel uses a 240*128 LCD (liquid crystal display); working states of the vehicle such as oil mass, water temperature, oil temperature, electricity quantity and rotation speeds are displayed by a graphical simulation pointer; the sates of the vehicle are displayed by images and texts; and the displayed contents are rich.