Battery modeling plays an important role in remaining range prediction and battery management system development. An accurate and realistic battery model is essential to design an efficient electric storage system. The goal of this paper is to investigate the performance of different circuit topologies for diffusion process in the equivalent circuit models (ECMs). The theory of diffusion process approximation by using resistive-capacitor (RC) networks is explained in frequency domain. The terminal voltage predictive capabilities of the ECMs are compared and validated with test data. The numerical simulation results show that model prediction accuracy and computation burdens increase along with the number of RC pairs. The ECM with three RC networks is the best choice in terms of the balance between accuracy and complexity for ternary lithium batteries. In addition, a novel method of combining unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm with initial state of charge (SOC) acceleration convergence for SOC estimation is proposed. The results of urban dynamometer driving schedule (UDDS) show that ECM with three RC networks has the best comprehensive performance on calculation cost and SOC estimation accuracy.