Temperature rise of the hub motor in distributed drive electric vehicles (DDEVs) under long-time and overload operating conditions brings parameter drift and degrades the performance of the motor. A novel online parameter identification method based on improved teaching-learning-based optimization (ITLBO) is proposed to estimate the stator resistance, ��-axis inductance, ��-axis inductance, and flux linkage of the hub motor with respect to temperature rise. The effect of temperature rise on the stator resistance, ��-axis inductance, ��-axis inductance, and magnetic flux linkage is analysed. The hub motor parameters are identified offline. The proposed ITLBO algorithm is introduced to estimate the parameters online. The Gaussian perturbation function is employed to optimize the TLBO algorithm and improve the identification speed and accuracy. The mechanisms of group learning and low-ranking elimination are established. After that, the proposed ITLBO algorithm for parameter identification is employed to identify the hub motor parameters online on the test bench. Compared with other parameter identification algorithms, both simulation and experimental results show the proposed ITLBO algorithm has rapid convergence and a higher convergence precision, by which the robustness of the algorithm is effectively verified. Keywords: parameters identification, teaching–learning-based optimization, hub motor, temperature rise.