Abstract: A wheel torque control strategy was presented for the distributed drive electric vehicle to control wheel torque when vehicle was accelerating in swerving. In the high level of the strategy, a sliding mode control was used to calculate the desired yaw moment and to improve the stability resulted from the model error and parameter inaccuracy. In the lower level of the strategy, an optimization algorithm was established to improve the maneuverability, to diminish energy loss, and also a solution was got based on the combination of offline mathematical programming and online optimization. The results based Matlab-Carsim co-simulation prove that the developed strategy can both improve the vehicle maneuverability and reduce energy consumption.