Over the last years issues regarding both the use and the improvement of energy management in electric vehicles have been highlighted by industry and academic fields. Some of the research has been focused on exploiting the ultracapacitor characteristics and on protecting the battery life. From this standpoint, this paper proposes an advanced energy management system based on the adequate discharge of the ultracapacitor bank in order to utilize all the energy available from the regenerative breaking. In this way, the energy consumption is reduced and the electric vehicle range is increased. This strategy, based on simple rules, takes advantage of the high power density of the ultracapacitor and prevents an overstress of the battery. The benefits are featured using three standard drive cycles for a 1550 kg electric vehicle via simulations. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.