The car accident detection function of Apple iPhone and Apple Watch, after a car accident, if the owner does not respond, it will automatically call for help from the rescue department.
In reality, crash detection has saved many lives. But there are also frequent false alarms, which increase the distress of the rescue department.
On January 30, it was reported that since the car accident detection function of Apple iPhone 14 was launched, false alarms have continued to occur, and every wrong call will bring an undue burden to the local emergency services.
In this latest incident, emergency services in the Northern Alps, Nagano Prefecture, Japan said,Between December 16 and January 23, they received 134 false alarms, mainly due to the iPhone 14’s car accident detection system being falsely triggered while the user was skiing.
Japan’s emergency services received a total of 919 calls during the month, and 134 of them came from false alarms from iPhone car accident detection, which means that Apple’s false alarms accounted for more than one-tenth of their workload.
False positives from the iPhone’s car crash detection feature have also been reported across the U.S. during winter sports, with another high incidence of false positives being triggered by roller coasters.
Sources say Apple is working with local emergency services to further alleviate the problem. At the end of December, the iOS 16.1.2 release notes showed that,Apple has added “Car Crash Detection Optimization” to iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models.