For the position tracking in DC motor with unknown bound time-varying dead zone uncertainties, a novel sliding mode adaptive controller is proposed by means of sliding mode and function approximation technique in this paper. First, control law with an uncertain term and another compensative term is obtained using sliding mode technique, and then the function approximation technique is employed to transform the uncertain term into finite combinations of orthonormal basis functions. The concrete expressions of uncertain term and compensative term can thus be derived based on the Lyapunov design. Actual system control experiments of the sliding adaptive control proposed are given.