This paper proposes a method to reach the equivalence between an IMC and a PI controller regardless of the model order. To this end, the key idea consists of using a specific IMC filter that exhibits a good level of robustness and further leads to get a structure of a PI controller whatever the order of the model is. The developed procedure constitutes the main contribution of this paper. To meet given set of specifications, the controller parameters are tuned through a straightforward analytic way using the dynamics of the tracking error. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the efficiency level of this procedure, an application to control an autonomous vehicle is described and the simulation results are shown to be satisfactory.