Accurate battery state-of-charge is essential for both driver notification and battery management units reliability in electric vehicle/hybrid electric vehicle. It is necessary to develop a robust state of charge (SOC) estimation approach to cope with nonlinear dynamic battery systems. This paper proposed an estimation method to identify the SOC online based on equivalent circuit battery model and unscented Kalman filter technique. Firstly, the parameters of dynamic battery model are identified offline and validated through typical electric vehicle road operation to guarantee its precision. Then the performance with respect to converge time, observer accuracy, robustness against system modeling errors, and mismatched initial SOC guess values is investigated. The accuracy of proposed estimation algorithm is validated under improved hybrid power pulse characterization test and New European Driving Cycle. Experiment and numerical simulation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method is highly reliable with good robustness to different operating conditions and battery aging.