New Crash Detection Feature on Latest Apple Devices — iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Ultra / 8 / SE (2nd generation) — processes sensor data to detect a collision.
If you do not respond to screen prompts, an alarm will sound and automatically call emergency services and provide your location. Google also offers similar functionality on its devices. pixel for a long time.
But does it work? To discover, WSJ crashed some cars with the help of Michael Barabe, a demolition champion from Monroe, Michigan.
WSJ put an iPhone 14 Pro Max and a Pixel 6 Pro in the two junkyard cars they were going to crash – one Ford Taurus 2003 it is a 2008 Dodge Caravan. In the car that was driven by the specialist, they put an iPhone 14 and a Pixel 5, and the driver wore an Apple Watch Ultra on his wrist.
About five seconds after first accident with the Ford Taurus head-on, at about 40 km/h, the Apple Watch Ultra on my wrist beeped an alert: “Looks like you had an accident.” The phones went flying to the floor of her car. Apple designed the feature to display the alert on the watch if it’s paired with an iPhone.
Even though the Taurus’s driver’s-side airbag did go off – and the entire front of the car was broken – the iPhone and Pixel in the car that was hit didn’t detect an accident. Not even the Pixel in the car that crashed.
In the second accident, the Taurus’s passenger-side airbag deployed and the bumper flew off. Once again, Taurus phones showed no alerts. Inside the car being driven, the Pixel detected the accident, but this time Apple devices didn’t.
In the third test, the car he was driving collided with the Dodge Caravan at about 40 km/h, shattering the windshield and deploying the airbags. Again, the iPhone and Apple Watch in Michael’s car showed an alert, but the Pixel did not. The Pixel and iPhone on the Dodge showed nothing.
When the WSJ contacted Apple with the results, a company spokesperson said that The junkyard’s testing conditions did not provide enough signals for the iPhone to trigger the feature in parked cars.
It wasn’t connected to Bluetooth or CarPlay, which would indicate the car was in use, and vehicles may not have traveled enough distance before the accident to indicate they were driving. If the iPhone had received these additional indicators — and if its GPS had shown that the cars were on an actual road — the likelihood of an alert would have been greater, he said.
A Google spokesperson also said that not only is the severity of an accident a factor, but similarly, the algorithm first needs to detect that you are driving.
