Someone even tested how well crash detection works on the iPhone 14. VIDEO

The iPhone 14 series doesn’t come with much new on board, aside from the small annual improvements we’ve come to expect, but it does include a number of new features that could save users’ lives in extreme cases. One would be satellite communication, which will only work in the US and Canada to start with, and which will sometime be for a fee, and another is crash detection. Of course, most reviews don’t include such “tests”, but a YouTuber called TechRax has conducted the first test to check whether indeed the iPhone 14 Pro Max can correctly identify when the user is involved in an accident.

Here’s what the iPhone 14 feature looks like that Apple hopes we never have to use

For this test, TechRax went a little further than most reviewers do, using a real old fully functional car and trying to activate crash detection by letting the car crash into other cars’ wrecks. His experiment was a success, however, managing to activate the feature on the iPhone twice, in the case of a mild crash and a slightly more brutal one. Of course, no one was in the car, so no one was injured in the tests.

The way Apple detects accidents involves using information from multiple sensors. The GPS shows that you’re moving in a vehicle, the accelerometer and gyroscope identify movement and especially impact, which leads to sudden deceleration, while the microphone records a loud noise. When all of these reach certain parameters at the same time, your phone knows you’ve been in a car accident. However, it turns out that entering emergency mode is not instantaneous, but occurs seconds after impact. Then, with a loud beep, the phone notifies users that it will call the emergency number, giving you 10 seconds to pause the process.

The good news is that the new feature Apple introduced does indeed work and could be useful in emergencies. Most iPhone users will most likely never encounter this capability, just as few among Apple Watch users receive notifications for heart arrhythmia or need to call emergency functions for fall detection.