As a complex field-circuit coupling system comprised of electric, magnetic and thermal machines, the permanent magnet synchronous motor of the electric vehicle has various operating conditions and complicated condition environment. There are various forms of failure, and the signs of failure are crossed or overlapped. Randomness, secondary, concurrency and communication characteristics make it difficult to diagnose faults. Meanwhile, the common intelligent diagnosis methods have low accuracy, poor generalization ability and difficulty in processing high-dimensional data. This paper proposes a method of fault feature extraction for motor based on the principle of stacked denoising autoencoder (SDAE) combined with the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. First, the motor signals collected from the experiment were processed, and the input data were randomly damaged by adding noise. Furthermore, according to the experimental results, the network structure of stacked denoising autoencoder was constructed, the optimal learning rate, noise reduction coefficient and the other network parameters were set. Finally, the trained network was used to verify the test samples. Compared with the traditional fault extraction method and single autoencoder method, this method has the advantages of better accuracy, strong generalization ability and easy-to-deal-with high-dimensional data features.