Abstract: The environment pollution and petroleum problems, which are increasingly becoming serious, have caused the vehicle industry to transition into a low-carbon and energy-saving industry. During processes, plug-in fuel-cell electric vehicles (PFCEVs) play an important role due to their advantages of rapid fueling, high energy density and efficiency, low operating temperature, and zero onboard emissions. PFCEVs use high-capacity rechargeable batteries to avoid working in low-efficiency areas. However, a robust energy management strategy that can achieve reliable energy distribution by regulating the output power of the fuel cell and battery within the hybrid powertrain merits further investigation. Considering the close relationship between the driving cycle, state of charge (SOC), equivalent factor, and hydrogen consumption, a trip distance adaptive equivalent consumption minimum strategy integrating driving cycle prediction is proposed. A backpropagation-based neural network is used to predict short-term vehicle velocity and analyze future changes in vehicle demand power. Planning a path to the destination with the help of the global positioning system, the intelligent transportation system can also obtain traffic flow information for the entire trip. The equivalent factor is dynamically corrected in real time using the driving distance and SOC to realize the adaptability of the energy management strategy. Finally, the velocity prediction sequence is combined with the objective function. The sequential quadratic programming algorithm is used to optimize the equivalent hydrogen consumption of the objective function and to obtain the distributed power of the fuel cell and battery. The vehicle simulation model is built and compared with a traditional energy management strategy based on MATLAB/Simulink software. The simulation results show that the driving cycle prediction algorithm based on the backpropagation-based neural network predicts future short-term conditions better, with a 12.5% higher accuracy than the Markov method. The proposed energy management strategy allows the fuel cell to operate in high-efficiency areas. The hydrogen consumption is 55.6% less than that of the CD/CS strategy under the UDDS cycle. The hardware in the loop experiment verifies a hydrogen consumption that is 26.8% less than that of the CD/CS strategy under the EUDC cycle. The numerical validation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed strategy in terms of hydrogen consumption over the CD/CS strategy. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by hardware during the loop experiment.