We presented a skeleton-driven model deformation method for the effective reuse of finite element (FE) models in auto-body structural analysis. Skeletons were defined to describe the body structure and control blocks embedding the body structure based on the geometry of the given FE model. Then, the constraint between the skeleton curve set and control blocks of the given model were established so that the user can derive the desired shape of control blocks by editing the skeleton curves. Finally, the deformed FE model was reconstructed by using the spatial deformation method. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can obtain physically plausible deformed results and achieve the effective reuse of the given FE models. In addition, using skeleton curves as the handles can provide users with an intuitive way to manipulate FE models.