Research on optimization of control strategy for hybrid energy storage system (HESS) of the electric vehicle (EV), a new adaptive control strategy based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed in this paper. The steady-state power of the filtered power is used as the ideal output power of the battery. For the steady-state current output of the battery, the output power of the ultracapacitor is dynamically adjusted by the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to construct a power difference control structure. The parameters of PID controller are optimized by PSO algorithm, and the target test is compared and analyzed based on MATLAB/Advisor. The research results show that the proposed PSO-PID control strategy can quickly eliminate the power deviation and achieve the approximate global optimization of the EV energy management strategy. Compared with the pre-optimized PID control strategy, the output current and power of the battery pack are smoother and the total power consumption is reduced by 3.8360% and 0.5125%, respectively. Then, the energy consumption parameters of PSO-PID are compared with the theoretical minimum energy consumption calculated by dynamic programming (DP) algorithm, and the deviation is less than 1% under both conditions.