This paper investigates the performance of a three-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive operating under a single fault, adopting a low cost and fault-tolerant control based on deadbeat-direct torque and flux control (DB-DTFC). Under faulty operation, this fault-tolerant DB-DTFC offers an independent regulation of the electromagnetic torque and the stator flux linkage by using the same torque line equation, stator flux linkage, and current observers adopted during healthy conditions, requiring very limited hardware reconfigurations. In particular, it has been demonstrated that in a fault situation, the same drive model equations adopted for the healthy electric drive can be exploited with very limited detrimental effects on the drive performance simply by applying a suitable reference frame transformation set in the torque and flux control structure. The proposed fault-tolerant DB-DTFC has been validated by experimental tests, confirming that the proposed fault-tolerant DB-DTFC ensures satisfactory faulty operations and drive stability, without significant degradation of parameter sensitivity, keeping limited the increment of computational efforts.