Differentiable physics is an approach that effectively combines physical models with deep learning, providing valuable information about physical systems during the training process of neural networks. This integration enhances the generalization ability and ensures better consistency with physical principles. In this work, we propose a framework for estimating the temperature of a permanent magnet synchronous motor by combining neural networks with the differentiable physical thermal model, as well as utilizing the simulation results. In detail, we first implement a differentiable thermal model based on a lumped parameter thermal network within an automatic differentiation framework. Subsequently, we add a neural network to predict thermal resistances, capacitances, and losses in real time and utilize the thermal parameters’ optimized empirical values as the initial output values of the network to improve the accuracy and robustness of the final temperature estimation. We validate the conceivable advantages of the proposed method through extensive experiments based on both synthetic data and real-world data and then provide some further potential applications.