Despite high potentials of power-split hybrid electric vehicles (PS-HEV), their design and control problems are non-trivial. For instance, there exist twenty four ways of connecting four components (two electric machines, an engine, and a vehicle wheel) with a planetary gear (PG), and more than thousand ways with two PGs. Furthermore, when PG and final drive ratios are considered design variables, finding an optimal design that fulfills both high fuel economy and fast acceleration performance is a challenge. In this paper, a systematic configuration searching methodology is proposed to find an optimal single PG PS-HEV configuration for both performance metrics. First, by identifying all the possible single PG configurations and reorganizing them into a compound lever design space, the performance metrics are explored in the continuous design space. Then, the designs are mapped onto the ‘fuel economy – acceleration performance’ plane to solve the multi-objective configuration selection problem. Thus, a highly-promising configuration (‘o6’), which outperforms Prius design in the acceleration performance, is selected among Prato Frontier. Two case studies have been conducted on two sport utility vehicle specifications. These studies illustrate that the performances of candidate configurations change significantly, and thus selecting a proper configuration is crucial to evoke full potential of the given powertrain components.