In automotive engineering, two types of digital human models are generally used: Kinematic multibody models (KM) for ergonomic vehicle design and finite element human body models (HBM) for evaluating crash simulations in safety studies. The simulation of active movements is limited with such models. The KM represent movements as a sequence of body postures. They do not consider muscle forces, inertia effects, or accelerations. The simulation with HBM requires a high computational effort. Active movements are usually restricted to holding a prescribed position. Thus, these types of models are not able to simulate pronounced, intentional movements of the limbs. In contrast, active multibody models (AM) in combination with optimal control methods are able to predict realistic human motions and are used to study various fields of application, e.g., sports techniques, movement disorders, and human-robot interactions. We show the benefits such AM offer for the vehicle design process by applying our AM EMMA on both mentioned fields, the ergonomic vehicle design and safety studies. We illustrate that the ergonomic assessment can be accelerated by automatically calculating complex movements such as car ingress movements. Their evaluation currently requires a high manual effort using KM because a sequence of postures must be specified by hand that a person can dynamically perform in real life without colliding with the vehicle interior. Furthermore, we extend the safety studies by simulating the pre-crash phase or, more generally, driving maneuvers that are difficult to investigate experimentally with real subjects such as emergency braking maneuvers. The presented simulation scenarios highlight the big potential of AM in industrial applications and identify the remaining challenges regarding a realistic human force generation and the contact modeling between occupant and vehicle interior.