Accurate estimation of lithium battery state of charge is very important for ensuring the operation of battery management system, realizing the energy management strategy of electric vehicles, reducing mileage anxiety and promoting the sustainable development of electric vehicles. In this paper, several studies are carried out for state of charge estimation of lithium-ion battery: (1) Aiming at the problem of parameter identification of battery model, an optimal identification method of model parameters based on ant lion optimization algorithm is proposed. (2) An adaptive weighting Cubature particle filter (AWCPF) method is proposed for SOC estimation. The proposed AWCPF method is based on particle filter (PF) algorithm, while the Cubature Kalman filter (CKF) algorithm is utilized to generate the proposal distribution for PF algorithm, which can retrain the particles degradation problem in PF algorithm. To solve the problem that the CKF algorithm is sensitive to noise, comparing with fixed sigma point weights of the conventional CKF, the weights of sigma points are adaptively adjusted based on state and measurement residual vectors. Furthermore, the process noise and measurement noise are estimated iterative. In this paper, experimental verification of different initial values of SOC under various working conditions is carried out. The results show that the proposed AWCPF algorithm based SOC estimation method has high estimation accuracy, strong robustness, fast convergence speed, with the maximum SOC estimation error is less than 1%.