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In recent years, electric vehicles (EVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) have become very popular. Therefore, the use of secondary batteries exponentially increased in EV systems. Battery fuel gauges determine the amount of charge inside the battery, and how much farther the vehicle can drive itself under specific operating conditions. It is very important to provide accurate state-of-charge (SOC) information of the battery module to the driver, since inaccurate fuel gauges will not be tolerated. In this paper, a model-based approach is proposed to estimate the SOCs of multiple lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cells, connected in a module in series, by using a nonlinear state observer (NSO) and an online parameter identification algorithm. A simple method of estimating the impedance and SOC of each cell in a module is also presented in this paper, by employing a ratio vector with respect to the reference value. A battery model based on an autoregressive model with exogenous input (ARX) was used with recursive least squares (RLS) for parameter identification, in an effort to guarantee reliable estimation results under various operating conditions. The validity and feasibility of the proposed algorithm were verified by an experimental setup of six Li-ion battery cells connected in a module in series. It was found that, when compared with a simple linear state observer (LSO), an NSO can further reduce the SOC error by 1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]