This paper presents a study of the combined influence of battery models and sizing strategy for hybrid and battery-based electric vehicles. In particular, the aim is to find the number of battery (and super capacitor) cells to propel a light vehicle to run two different standard driving cycles. Three equivalent circuit models are considered to simulate the battery electrical performance: linear static, non-linear static and non-linear with first-order dynamics. When dimensioning a battery-based vehicle, less complex models may lead to a solution with more battery cells and higher costs. Despite the same tendency, when a hybrid vehicle is taken into account, the influence of the battery models is dependent on the sizing strategy. In this work, two sizing strategies are evaluated: dynamic programming and filter based. For the latter, the complexity of the battery model has a clear influence on the result of the sizing problem. On the other hand, a modest influence is observed when a dynamic programming strategy is followed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.