The iPhone 14’s new collision detection feature, which is supposed to alert authorities when it detects you’ve been in a car accident, has an unexpected side effect: it calls for help on the roller coaster.
Apple recently introduced a new feature with the iPhone 14 series of phones called Crash Detection. It uses a combination of several sensors on your iPhone to detect if you have been in a car accident and notify the emergency services to send help. It is also present in the new Apple Watch Series 8, but also in the high-end Apple Watch UItra.
Several Youtubers have already tested the functionality in real situations by creating fake crashes, and indeed, it seems that the detection works wonderfully. However, it seems that this function accidentally triggers a large number of emergency calls from a roller coaster.
Crash detection triggers nuisance calls from amusement parks
A dispatch center in Warren County, Ohio told The Wall Street Journal six calls from iPhones whose owners were not involved in a car accident, but were on rides at Kings Island, the local amusement park. Erroneous reports have also been made by visitors to the Six Flags Great America park near Chicago.
The iPhones were however simply in the pockets or in the bags of the passengers of the wagons. After getting downstairs and checking their iPhones, the various iPhone owners were greeted with numerous missed calls and voicemails from an emergency dispatcher asking if they were okay.
The police even made the trip to the area to respond to the emergency.e, since the fake victims couldn’t call the emergency services early enough to let them know that everything was fine. Such instances of false alarms triggered by the iPhone 14 make it unreliable and also a huge inconvenience to emergency services as officers are dispatched to the scene for nothing.
However, there may be a temporary solution: activate airplane mode. All owners of new Apple devices are advised to enable Airplane Mode to disable Crash Detection alerts, or simply turn off their iPhone. It remains to be seen whether Apple will be able to roll out an update in the future that will distinguish between roller coasters and other vehicles.
Source : WSJ
