Due to the influencing factors, such as irregularity of guide, piston wind excitation in the hoistway, and uncertain swinging of hoisting rope during the operation of high-speed traction elevator, car will produce dramatic horizontal vibration. With the purpose of suppressing this vibration effectively, the active car shock absorber is designed with linear motor, and a five-degrees-of-freedom space vibration model of the car is established and, subsequently, its state space equation is derived. For the uncertainty external excitation in the car system, the back propagation neural network proportional–integral–derivative controller with linear prediction model is designed for the intelligent active control of the vibration of the car, and simulation analysis is carried out with MATLAB/Simulink. The result shows that the active shock absorber designed in this study can effectively suppress the horizontal vibration of high-speed elevator car, better than traditional proportional–integral–derivative controller. This study has opened up a new idea of high-speed elevator vibration damping method, and is of important referential significance for the field of active control of car vibration.