Distributed-drive vehicles utilize independent drive motors on the four-wheel hubs. The working conditions of the wheel-hub motors are so harsh that the motors are prone to failing under different driving conditions. This study addresses the impact of drive motor faults on vehicle performance, particularly on slippery roads where sudden faults can lead to accidents. A fault-tolerant control system integrating motor fault diagnosis and a direct yaw moment control (DYC) based fault-tolerant controller are proposed to ensure the stability of the vehicle during various motor faults. Due to the difficulty of identifying the parameters of the popular permanent magnet synchronous wheel hub motors (PMSMs), the system employs a model-free backpropagation neural network (BPNN)-based fault detector. Turn-to-turn short circuits, open-phase faults, and diamagnetic faults are considered in this research. The fault detector is trained offline and utilizes rotor speed and phase currents for online fault detection. The system assigns the torque outputs from both healthy and faulted motors based on fault categories using sliding mode control (SMC)-based DYC. Simulations with four-wheel electric vehicle models demonstrate the accuracy of the fault detector and the effectiveness of the fault-tolerant controller. The proposed system is prospective and has potential for the development of distributed electric vehicles.