Active safety measures such as emergency and autonomous braking offer the possibility to avoid or to mitigate accidents. Especially for the mitigation systems the change in posture and the motion of the occupants resulting from the pre‐impact manoeuvres are important input parameters for passive safety measures. This is especially true when using human models because it is almost impossible to simulate the whole process from the intervention up to the impact due to computational efforts and numerical instabilities. In this study the change in posture and motion of front seat passengers in several manoeuvres (such as braking with different acceleration level and lane change with different amplitudes) are assessed using a fixed track with defined scenarios. The occupants are filmed from several perspectives and the movement is tracked. In addition to volunteers the tests are executed with dummies to compare the motion. The data show a large spread between individual subjects that is mainly independent from anthropometry. However, the adult dummies’ movement is normally within the spread of the human subjects. Furthermore the stabilisation by the arm rest (if used) seems to have an important influence on the results. The applied methods were discussed and improvements were proposed.