State of charge (SOC) estimation is becoming increasingly important, along with electric vehicle (EV) rapid development, while SOC is one of the most significant parameters for the battery management system, indicating remaining energy and ensuring the safety and reliability of EV. In this paper, a hybrid wavelet neural network (WNN) model combining the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) method and adaptive WNN is proposed to estimate the SOC of lithium-ion batteries. The WNN model is trained by Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) algorithm, whose inputs are processed by discrete wavelet decomposition and reconstitution. Compared with back-propagation neural network (BPNN), L-M based BPNN (LMBPNN), L-M based WNN (LMWNN), DWT with L-M based BPNN (DWTLMBPNN) and extend Kalman filter (EKF), the proposed intelligent SOC estimation method is validated and proved to be effective. Under the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), the mean absolute error and maximum error can be reduced to 0.59% and 3.13%, respectively. The characteristics of high accuracy and strong robustness of the proposed method are verified by comparison study and robustness evaluation results (e.g., measurement noise test and untrained driving cycle test).