Automotive cyber-physical systems need to be rigorously checked and tested under various physical conditions. Automakers aim to improve development efficiency of the automotive cyber-physical systems in the fierce market competition. However, the actual development process suffers from the challenges of long development cycle and poor scalability. To tackle these challenges, this article develops a digital twinning based adaptive development environment for automotive cyber-physical systems, which addresses two critical problems: each physical entity (i.e., electronic control unit, component, test source, etc.) needs to clone a corresponding digital twin; digital twins and the physical entities need to interact closely. The first problem is addressed through proposing an integrated digital twinning clone flow. The second problem is addressed through developing a smart digital twinning board. Our case study with the automotive body control system demonstrates that the adaptive development environment achieves a high adaptability with short development cycle, low complexity, low cost, high scalability, and high flexibility, which meet various automotive cyber-physical design requirements during the development process.