An accurate SoC (state of charge) and SoP (state of power capability) joint estimator is the most significant techniques for electric vehicles. This paper makes two contributions to the existing literature. (1) A data-driven parameter identification method has been proposed for accurately capturing the real-time characteristic of the battery through the recursive least square algorithm, where the parameter of the battery model is updated with the real-time measurements of battery current and voltage at each sampling interval. (2) An adaptive extended Kalman filter algorithm based multi-state joint estimator has been developed in accordance with the relationship of the battery SoC and its power capability. Note that the SoC and SoP can be predicted accurately against the degradation and various operating environments of the battery through the data-driven parameter identification method. The robustness of the proposed data-driven joint estimator has been verified by different degradation states of lithium-ion polymer battery cells. The result indicates that the estimation errors of voltage and SoC are less than 1% even if given a large erroneous initial state of joint estimator, which makes the SoP estimate more accurate and reliable for the electric vehicles application. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.