The voltage-source inverters (VSI) supplying a motor drive are prone to open transistor faults. To address this issue in faulttolerant drives applicable to electric vehicles, a new open transistor fault diagnosis (FD) method is presented in this paper. According to the proposed method, in order to define the FD index, the phase angle of the converter output current is estimated by a simple trigonometric function. The proposed FD method is adaptable, simple, capable of detecting multiple open switch faults and robust to load operational variations. Keeping the FD in mind as a mandatory part of the fault tolerant control algorithm, the FD block is applied to a five-phase converter supplying a multiphase fault-tolerant PM motor drive with nonsinusoidal unbalanced current waveforms. To investigate the performance of the FD technique, the fault-tolerant sliding mode control (SMC) of a five-phase brushless direct current (BLDC) motor is developed in this paper with the embedded FD block. Once the theory is explained, experimental waveforms are obtained from a five-phase BLDC motor to show the effectiveness of the proposed FD method. The FD algorithm is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA).