In recent years, the platoon control of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) has attracted a lot of attention in intelligent transport research. The third-order nonlinear vehicle dynamics model, due to its practicality, has been adopted in many research projects. In platoon control, controller input delays and disturbances are the significant issues that cannot be ignored. To this end, this paper investigates the cooperative control problem of third-order nonlinear CAVs platoon with controller input delays and unknown external disturbances. First, the neural network (NN) is used to approximate external disturbances with unknown bounds. Then, with the help of Pade approximation, a new variable is introduced to deal with the input delays. Subsequently, a corresponding compensation system is constructed based on the introduced variable. At last by using backstepping approach, a distributed adaptive control strategy based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is proposed in this paper. Additionally, Lyapunov functions and the uniformly ultimately bounded stability theorem are used to demonstrate the stability of the closed-loop systems, and the effectiveness of the control strategy is demonstrated by a simulation example.