The braking intention is of great significance to the realization of driver assistant features, the improvement of braking safety, and the maximization of energy recovery efficiency for electric vehicles. With the aim of accurate identification of braking intention, an identification model based on Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Network with Attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. Based on numerous vehicle braking test data, braking process analysis, characteristic parameters selection, identification model training, and verification are carried out. Through the difference analysis based on the Kruskal-Wallis test and the importance evaluation based on random forest, combined with the real-time requirements of practical application, the appropriate characteristic parameters are selected as the model input. The attention mechanism is introduced into the proposed model, which can improve identification accuracy by capturing valuable feature information. The comparative verification results show that the Attention-GRU model performs better than the other three comparison models, and its identification accuracy is 96.7%, of which the accuracy of slight braking, normal braking, and emergency braking are 96.3%, 95.8%, and 100% respectively. The identified braking intention can provide an effective basis for the establishment of vehicle control strategies.