“911, what’s your emergency?”
“WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOHAHAHAHAHA! YEAH!”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the iPhone 14’s crash detection is a bit too sensitive. Per their report, it has been falsely set off by roller coaster rides, which it detects as a car crash. It sends emergency services the message “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash and is not responding to their phone.”
You can hear just such a thing happening in the tweet below.
That call came from Kings Island amusement park outside Cincinnati, from an iPhone 14 belonging to dentist Sara White. It, naturally, caused an emergency team to be dispatched to King’s Island, which wasted their time since there was no emergency. But I imagine they enjoyed their time there, as it was probably pretty good for team building.
And it was far from the only such instance of crash detection at the park, as there were another 6 such calls made by iPhone 14’s. There was even one from the Joker roller coaster at Six Flags Great America near Chicago, though the owner of that phone remains unknown. Heck, it seems simply dropping your phone while driving will trigger the emergency call; slightly more respectable, but it still wastes emergency services’ time and money.
While the feature has great potential to save lives, it’s hard for it to do that while an emergency team is stuck in some amusement park hunting down an accident that didn’t happen. And, considering the iPhone 14 is currently new, there’s going to be more of this in the future unless there’s some way to update things so that it’s less likely to give off a false positive. Until then, users can disable the feature by either putting their phones in airplane mode, or disabling crash detection (Settings -> Emergency SOS -> Call After Severe Crash toggle) before getting on a ride. Though you might want to turn it back on afterwards.
Source: PC Mag
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