The attention on green and clean technology innovations is highly demanded of a modern era. Transportation has seen a high rate of growth in today's cities. The conventional internal combustion engine-operated vehicle liberates gasses like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and water, which result in the increased surface temperature of the earth. One of the optimum solutions to overcome fossil fuel degrading and global warming is electric vehicle. The challenging aspect in electric vehicle is its energy storage system. Many of the researchers mainly concentrate on the field of storage device cost reduction, its age increment, and energy densities' improvement. This paper explores an overview of an electric propulsion system composed of energy storage devices, power electronic converters, and electronic control unit. The battery with high-energy density and ultracapacitor with high-power density combination paves a way to overcome the challenges in energy storage system. This study aims at highlighting the various hybrid energy storage system configurations such as parallel passive, active, battery-UC, and UC-battery topologies. Finally, energy management control strategies, which are categorized in global optimization, are reviewed. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.