Summary Depletion of earth's petroleum resources, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming issues are caused by the conventional vehicles around the globe. In recent years, automotive industries focus on emerging alternative energy sources to mitigate the relying on fossil fuels so as to reduce global harmful emissions. Researchers have focused on the different aspects of hybrid and battery electric vehicles, such as energy management, regenerative braking control, and architecture of power electronics. This paper emphasizes on review of various energy management systems (EMSs) based on fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles (FCHEV) in combination with two secondary energy storage systems like batteries and ultracapacitors to provide high‐performance energy storage system. The performance of the FC–battery–ultracapacitor with various types of energy management schemes and experimental investigations is reported in this paper. This paper provides various braking control schemes to alleviate the hydrogen utilization of an FCHEV in connection with batteries and ultracapacitors and furthermore gives thorough investigation of FCHEV on their energy utilization, configuration, and EMSs developed by different analysts. This study focuses on energy allocation schemes, experimental approaches, recovery of regeneration, and EMS for next generation hybrid electric vehicles.