Generally, the distributed drive electric vehicle (DDEV) works under different fault status, and this may lead to unstable operating performance. However, the conventional fault-tolerant controller is only suitable for one special fault status, and thus, the stability of DDEV is hard to be guaranteed efficiently. To deal with this problem, a novel multiple model-based fault-tolerant control system (MMFTCS) is proposed in this paper. The MMFTCS integrates an operating status recognizer and a fault-tolerant controller set. The operating status recognizer is designed to distinguish current operating status, where the matching degree between current operating status and typical operating mode set is detected using fuzzy logic. The faulttolerant controller set is designed to achieve optimal fault-tolerant control, and each fault-tolerant controller is designed for the corresponding typical operating mode by the model predictive controller. The output of the MMFTCS is computed by the weighted signal of each fault-tolerant controller to realize smooth switching. The simulation is carried on the MATLAB environment, and the results show that the MMFTCS has excellent fault-tolerant performance under various operating status. Keywords Distributed drive electric vehicle (DDEV) • Multiple model method • Various actuator faults • Model predictive controller (MPC)