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The airflow into the engine bay of a passenger car is used for cooling down essential components of the vehicle, such as powertrain, air-conditioning compressor, intake charge air, batteries, and brake systems, before it returns back to the external flow. When the intake ram pressure becomes high enough to supply surplus cooling air flow, this flow can be actively regulated by using arrays of grille shutters, namely active grille shutters (AGS), in order to reduce the drag penalty due to excessive cooling. In this study, the operation of AGS for a generic SUV-type model vehicle is optimized for improved fuel economy on a highway drive cycle (part of SFTP-US06) by using surrogate models. Both vehicle aerodynamic power consumption and under-hood cooling performance are assessed by using PowerFLOW, a high-fidelity flow solver that is fully coupled with powertrain heat exchanger models.