Accurate state of charge (SOC) estimation of traction batteries plays a crucial role in energy and safety management for electric vehicles. Existing studies focus primarily on cell battery SOC estimation. However, numerical instability and divergence problems might occur for a large-size lithium-ion battery pack consisting of many cells. This paper proposes a high-performance online model identification and SOC estimation method based on an adaptive square root unscented Kalman filter (ASRUKF) and an improved forgetting factor recursive least squares (IFFRLS) for vehicle-level traction battery packs. The model parameters are identified online through the IFFRLS, where the conventional method might encounter numerical stability problems. By updating the square root of the covariance matrix, the divergence problem in the traditional unscented Kalman filter is solved in the ASRUKF algorithm, where the positive semi-definiteness of the covariance matrix is guaranteed. Combined with the adaptive noise covariance matched filtering algorithm and real-time compensation of system error, the proposed method solves the problem of ever-degrading estimation accuracy in the presence of time-varying noise with unknown statistical characteristics. Using a 66.2-kWh vehicle battery pack, we experimentally verified that the proposed algorithm could achieve high estimation accuracy with guaranteed numerical stability. The maximum error of SOC estimation can be bounded by 1%, and the root-mean-square error is as low as 0.47% under real-world vehicle operating conditions.