Apple’s fall hardware launch put a lot of focus on user safety, especially the new car crash detection feature, but it appears that the safety trick is also raising a few false alarms, even in fun scenarios like riding a roller coaster. Apple had boldly claimed that the crash detection system was tested for years with data worth over a million hours and controlled real-life crashes before it was finally rolled out for its latest generation of phones and smartwatches.
But false alarms from a high-speed roller coaster ride are not the first incident of its kind, though. A few weeks ago, an iPhone 14 Pro Max user had quite a harrowing experience when their phone flew off the mount as the bike hit a bump on the road. The phone’s sensors perceived the sudden change in momentum as an incident of a serious vehicle crash and sent an alert to the emergency rescue team and the close family contacts. The perceived life-threatening impact assessment in a no-accident scenario with an electric bike was just the beginning.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the Warren County Communications Center had received multiple emergency calls of people seemingly getting into a crash when they were just hitching a ride on roller coasters in the Kings Island area. But such false alarms are not limited to one particular recreational hub. The report adds that such calls have also been received in the vicinity of Chicago. And from the chain of events, it is evident that such calls will only become widespread until Apple fine-tunes the algorithms and motion sensitivity protocols behind the car crash detection that relies on a next-gen G-sensor for detecting a sudden high-magnitude change in momentum.
An Update Is On The Way
In response to the incidents, Apple reiterated that the feature was of critical importance and that its team would continue to refine it over time. In the meanwhile, Apple has also promised to roll out an update that will allow iPhones and compatible Apple Watch models to distinguish between a real car crash and a roller coaster experience quick acceleration from height as well as braking. But, for now, what is additionally bothersome – apart from the false alarm – is the language of the crash alert.
“The robotic call to 911 operators says that there was a severe crash, not that there might have been a severe crash,” notes the report. For folks that are not a part of Apple’s ecosystem but still want a life-saving feature like the one developed by Apple, Google’s Pixel 3 and its successors come with a similar crash detection feature that alerts the 911 helpline if the phone detects that something like a car crash may have happened. In-depth details about how it works and can be enabled can be found in Google’s support document.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, Google Support