The traffic preview information is very helpful for hybrid vehicles when distributing the power requirement of the vehicle to power sources and when determining the next driving route of the vehicle. In this research, an energy management approach for hybrid vehicles is proposed, which optimizes the vehicle velocity profile while minimizing the fuel consumption with the help of the traffic preview information, so that a further energy saving for hybrid vehicles can be achieved. The Pontryagin's Minimum Principle (PMP) is adopted on the proposed approach. A fuel cell hybrid vehicle (FCHV) is selected as an example, and the proposed energy management approach is applied to the FCHV in a computer simulation environment for the offline and online cases respectively. Simulation results show that the fuel economy of the FCHV is improved by the proposed energy management approach compared to a benchmark case where the driving cycle is fixed and only the hybrid power split (allocation) ratio is optimized. The proposed energy management approach is useful especially for the autonomous hybrid vehicles. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.