Environmental pollution and energy crisis directly promoted the traditional fuel cars to the development of environmentfriendly electric vehicles (EVs). As one of the key components of EVs, motor drive control system directly affected prospects of EVs in future. In the motor drive control system operation process, the interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) used a relatively simple id=0 control mode could not meet the high torque requirements of automobile. Due to a large number of discrete data points, the lookup table control mode of traditional maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) would seriously affect the speed response of system. To solve above problems, an improved MTPA control method with equivalent integrated current vector control was presented. At first, the mathematical model of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) was established to analyze the basic principle of id=0 and MTPA vector control mode to present a novel MTPA control method. To compare the two methods of vector controls, the feasibility and superiority of integrated equivalent current control of MTPA was verified by simulation and prototype experiment.