In order to reduce pollutants of the emission from diesel vehicles, complex after-treatment technologies have been proposed, which make the fault detection of diesel engines become increasingly difficult. Thus, this paper proposes a canonical correlation analysis detection method based on fault-relevant variables selected by an elitist genetic algorithm to realize high-dimensional data-driven faults detection of diesel engines. The method proposed establishes a fault detection model by the actual operation data to overcome the limitations of the traditional methods, merely based on benchmark. Moreover, the canonical correlation analysis is used to extract the strong correlation between variables, which constructs the residual vector to realize the fault detection of the diesel engine air and after-treatment system. In particular, the elitist genetic algorithm is used to optimize the fault-relevant variables to reduce detection redundancy, eliminate additional noise interference, and improve the detection rate of the specific fault. The experiments are carried out by implementing the practical state data of a diesel engine, which show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.