With the announcement of the iPhone 14 line, Apple announced that its new devices are equipped with sensors and technology that can detect when a user has been in a car accident. The iPhone will then ask to call emergency services and automatically call if the user does not answer.
iPhone 14 Pro Max
The Wall Street newspaperJoanna Stern teamed up with a demolition derby driver in Michigan to test if they could get the new iPhone to activate the safety feature.
An iPhone 14, a Google Pixel were placed in the derby car and an Apple Watch Ultra was strapped to the driver’s wrist. An iPhone 14 Pro Max and a Pixel 6 were placed in a stationary junk vehicle that was about to crash. The test involved driving a derby vehicle (driven by a professional derby driver) into the parked car and seeing which devices triggered accident detection.
After crashing vehicles and seeing mixed results from the iPhone and Pixel, The Wall Street newspaper reached out to Apple for comment.
When I contacted Apple with the results, a company spokesperson said the test conditions at the landfill didn’t provide enough signals for the iPhone to activate the feature in stationary cars.
For shock detection to work, it must first detect that the device is inside a moving vehicle. WSJ points out that an algorithm takes several factors into account for functionality to work. Motion sensors detect sudden changes in movement, Microphones can detect loud sounds such as the impact of the accident, the barometer can detect changes in air pressure when airbags are deployed, GPS the readings can detect sudden deceleration in a moving vehicle (or detect that it is in a vehicle) e CarPlay and Bluetooth the status can better report whether the device is actually in a vehicle.
The crash detection features in both Google and Apple cannot detect all types of crashes. There is also a disclaimer right under the Crash Detection setting on new iPhones that says exactly that. In all cases, however, the devices must first be able to detect that it is inside a moving vehicle, involving some or all of the signals mentioned above.
We hope no one ever needs to use a crash detection feature on their smartphones, but features like these have the potential to save lives in the event of a crash.
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