In consideration of the uncertain and time-varying driving resistance in vehicle dynamics, a distributed adaptive sliding model control protocol is proposed in vehicle platoon control. Firstly, the vehicle resistance, which is relevant to vehicle mass, weather conditions, deadweight, motorcycle type and etc, is analyzed and the vehicle platoon model is established. Then, a coupled sliding mode surface is designed to link the inter-connected vehicles and an adaptive control method is adopted to identify and estimate the variations of resistance coefficients. After that, a distributed adaptive sliding mode control algorithm for vehicle platoon with uncertain driving resistance is proposed, which realizes the stable vehicle platoon in the presence of uncertain and time-varying driving resistance. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control laws is validated by numerical simulations.