The invention discloses a multi-channel CAN data acquisition terminal and method for a road test vehicle. The method comprises the following steps: 1, setting that a host and a slave have the same SPIsampling frequency and cache; 2, connecting the GPIO ports of the host and the slave , setting the GPIO port of the slave as an output, initializing the GPIO port of the slave into a high level, andsetting the GPIO port of the host as an input; 3, when the slave receives the first frame of CAN data, starting a millisecond counter and sending a timing start notification to the host, adding real-time millisecond time to each frame of CAN data, then packaging the CAN data and putting the packaged CAN data into a cache, and when the cache is full or preset time is up, setting the GPIO port of the slave to be low level; and 4, when the host receives the timing start notification, recording a current timestamp as starting time, and when it is monitored that the GPIO port of the slave is converted from a high level to a low level, reading the data packet in the cache of the slave through a SPI bus, unpackaging the data packet into each frame of CAN data, adding the starting time to the CANdata, and storing each frame of CAN data into a file.