Aiming at the problems that the anti-interference performance of the traditional sliding mode speed observer is not strong enough and the step response has overshoot, an improved sliding mode control with disturbance compensation for permanent magnet synchronous motors is proposed. To solve the overshoot problem, the exponential reaching law of sliding mode control is improved. To improve the robustness and anti-interference of the system, fuzzy control is used to adjust the parameters of the sliding mode controller, and a nonlinear disturbance observer is adopted to estimate the system disturbance for feedforward compensation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is proved through simulation and experimental studies.