This paper presents an efficient method for automatic training of performant visual object detectors, and its successful application to training of a back-view car detec- tor. Our method for training detectors is adaBoost applied to a very general family of visual features (called “control-point” features), with a specific feature-selection weak-learner: evo-HC, which is a hybrid of Hill-Climbing and evolutionary-search. Very good results are obtained for the car-detection application: 95% positive car detection rate with less than one false positive per image frame, computed on an independant validation video. It is also shown that our original hybrid evo-HC weak-learner allows to obtain detection performances that are unreachable in rea- sonable training time with a crude random search. Finally our method seems to be potentially efficient for training detectors of very different kinds of objects, as it was already previously shown to provide state-of-art performance for pedestrian-detection tasks.