The new iPhone’s highlight feature – car accident detection and SOS alerts – really work. And immediately it happened for real abroad and made it to the top of the news. But what I didn’t expect was that this iPhone 14, which flew off a motorbike, would also automatically send an SMS to notify family members and call the police.
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By Deng Simiao from Vice Driving Temple
Source: Smart Car Reference
The man was fine, but friends and family said they were scared to death.
It’s a big oops.
What happened?
A day with no surprises.
As usual, Douglas Sonders was riding his beloved motorbike from New York City through Manhattan’s West Side Highway.
The motorcycle was travelling at around 60mph (97km/h) on the highway.
But to my surprise, the motorbike drove over a rise in the road, lurched slightly and ended up knocking out his newly purchased iPhone 14 Pro Max.
The main reason for this was that the phone mount he was using had not yet been fitted with a new version. As an alternative, he put an adhesive on the back of his iPhone case and glued it to the mount.
Immediately after the phone flew out, the Bluetooth headset alerted him: “Your phone has been disconnected” and the music then stopped playing.
As he was on the motorway, he couldn’t stop and look around for his phone, so he just walked away.
After he had left, the iPhone 14 did the following.
sent a text message to all of his pre-defined “family” in his contacts, informing them that he had been in a car accident.
Automatically called 911 to report the accident.
After receiving the text, his girlfriend planned a four-hour drive to the location where he dropped his phone; his girlfriend, brother and mother even called every hospital in New York City to find out where he was.
As it turned out, he was fine and sound, calling his family 45 minutes after he was lost to let them know he was okay.
He also tweeted about the experience afterwards, with many commenters “crying and laughing” at the bottom.
The missing phone was later found intact, but the front screen had been crushed.
All in all, it was a real test of the new iPhone’s ability to drive through the oops.
These are the two latest features to be introduced in the iPhone 14 release, related to the car and connected to traffic.
Collision detection and SOS emergency contact.
iPhone 14 comes with a new dual-core acceleration sensor and high dynamic range gyroscope that can detect violent acceleration or deceleration movements of up to 256Gs and will help you call for help if it determines that you have been involved in a serious car accident.
A barometer can also be used to monitor changes in air pressure inside the cabin, GPS can identify more data on speed changes and a microphone can identify the typical noise made by a crash.
This feature also works seamlessly in conjunction with the latest Apple Watch, which will display the emergency services call screen directly on the Apple Watch screen in the event of a major crash being detected, or make a call through your iPhone if a smaller crash is detected, ensuring the best possible connection quality.
Apple also said that the feature relies on advanced algorithms “trained over a million hours of real-world driving” and various crash data, and is expected to minimise false alarms and prevent them from taking up emergency services, which users themselves can cancel.
This comes after Apple collected more than 10 million suspected crashes shared anonymously by iPhone and Apple Watch users to test the feature.
At the time, to determine if these collisions were car accidents, Apple had also been using 911 call data to improve the accuracy of its collision detection algorithm.
But judging from this oops incident, the accuracy of this algorithm leaves something to be desired.
Not only motorbikes but also cars can be detected
Some foreign users have also tested this collision detection function, in real life.
In the wild, no man’s land, oil pipe blogger @TechRax strapped his iPhone 14Pro to the main driver’s seat headrest and created two artificial crashes by remotely controlling the car.
In the first crash, the driving speed was not too fast.
Immediately after the collision, he got into his car to check it out, and after a delay of about 10 seconds, this screen appeared on his phone, alerting him that “you appear to have been in a car accident”.
Immediately afterwards, the phone sounded an ear-splitting alarm and immediately started an SOS countdown.
In the second crash, the car was faster and more violent, and smoke was billowing out after the collision.
The footage captured by the GoPro inside the car looked like this
The iPhone also detected that a collision had occurred this time, and the page automatically displayed a 10-second countdown which, if not cancelled in time, would then automatically notify emergency contacts of the alarm.
The iPhone’s collision detection function, as seen in the video of Xiao’s actual test, is really good and can even save lives in an emergency.
Some users also said that this iPhone feature is in preparation for the Apple Smart Car.
So now, it’s just about the car.
