Sophisticated fuzzy rule systems are supposed to be flexible, complete, consistent and compact (FC 3). Flexibility, completeness and consistency are essential for fuzzy systems to exhibit an excellent performance and to have a clear physical meaning, while compactness is crucial when the number of the input variables increases. However, the completeness and consistency conditions are often violated if a fuzzy system is generated from data collected from real world applications. In an attempt to develop FC 3 fuzzy systems, a systematic design paradigm is proposed using evolution strategies. The structure of the fuzzy rules, which determines the compactness of the fuzzy systems, is evolved along with the parameters of the fuzzy systems. Special attention has been paid to the completeness and consistency of the rule base. The completeness is guaranteed by checking the completeness of the fuzzy partitioning of input variables and the completeness of the rule structure. An index of inconsistency is suggested with the help of a fuzzy similarity measure, which can prevent the algorithm from generating rules that seriously contradict with each other or with the heuristic knowledge. In addition, soft T-norm and BADD defuzzification are introduced and optimized to increase the flexibility of the fuzzy system. The proposed approach is applied to the design of distance controller for cars. It is verified that a FC 3 fuzzy system works very well both for training and test driving situations, especially when the training data are insufficient.