In this paper, a control-oriented thermal model is presented for thermal management of battery electric vehicles that includes heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and a heat pump system. A cool-down scenario is considered for a battery and a cabin for a hot ambient temperature, possibly above 45 °C. The developed model for the thermal energy management (TEM) system is validated against high-fidelity simulation software (GT-SUITE). The results indicate that the cabin air and the battery temperature have a root-mean-square error of 0.75% and 0.71 % at steady-state, respectively. Validation of the transient responses shows that the trajectories from the proposed model follow the same trend as those from GT-SUITE. Moreover, the proposed model is smooth and computationally tractable for use in real-time control applications.