In recent years, there has been a significant focus on synchronous reluctance motors (SynRM) owing to their impressive efficiency and absence of magnetic material. Although the SynRM shows great potential for use in electric vehicles, its widespread adoption is limited by unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances. Moreover, the uncertainty factor significantly restricts SynRM’s peak efficiency and superior control performance, leading to an unjustifiable current loop reference command. To address these issues, this work presents various new research contributions which focus on the robust control of SynRM to optimize performance through the novel reaching law-based sliding mode control. Initially, a novel advanced sliding mode control reaching law (ASMCRL) with adaptive gain is proposed, to enhance the acceleration of the system state reaching the sliding surface. After that, an extended state observer (ESO) is designed to estimate and compensate for the overall disturbances of the system. Finally, the ASMCRL and ESO are integrated to design two nonlinear controllers namely, the disturbance-rejection sliding mode controller (DRSMC) and the disturbance-rejection sliding mode speed regulator (DRSMSR) for SynRM. The proposed DRSMSR eliminates the steady-state error and eradicates inherent chattering in DRSMC. Moreover, this yields a system trajectory that converges to a predetermined proximity of the sliding surface, irrespective of any lumped disturbances. The steady-state error of DRSMSR is less as compared to DRSMC. Furthermore, the speed response of this technique is 22.62% faster as compared to the state-of-the-art finite-time adaptive terminal sliding mode control. Additionally, the asymptotic stability of the proposed system is validated using Lyapunov’s theorem. Thus the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.