This paper proposes a fault‐tolerant control strategy for the air path system of a turbocharged diesel engine, considering the simultaneous presence of matched and mismatched external disturbances, additive and loss of effectiveness fault modes in the EGR and VGT subsystems. Firstly, a disturbance observer based on theory is designed for estimating additive faults and external disturbances, and the upper bound of observation error is obtained. Based on the observation information, an integral sliding mode surface is designed, and the effectiveness of the sliding mode surface is analyzed. For the loss of effectiveness faults in the actuators, a novel adaptive update sliding mode controller is designed. The proposed control algorithm can get the fault information of the system and achieve fault‐tolerant control of through controller reconstruction. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through simulations and comparative analysis.