Apple’s Crash Detection feature on iPhone 14 is once again being credited with saving a life. This time, a man in California was drove off a cliff late on Friday and plummeted 400 feet into an abyss. At this point, Crash Detection on the man’s iPhone 14 kicked in and contacted a nearby communications center.
As reported by CBS Los Angeles, the crash occurred on on Mt. Wilson Road. The man drove off a cliff and plummeted 400 feet downwards before coming to a stop. Upon impact, the man’s iPhone 14 registered the event as a car crash, which initiated Crash Detection.
When Crash Detection recognizes a crash, it sends a notification allowing the user to confirm if they’re ok or if they need emergency services. If the user doesn’t respond to that notification with 20 seconds, the iPhone will automatically contact emergency services on the user’s behalf.
In the case of this crash, the man didn’t have cell service, so the iPhone used Emergency SOS via satellite to contact emergency services. A text message was sent to an Apple relay center, which included the man’s location. That Apple relay center then called emergency services on his behalf.
The Crescenta Valley Station of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department received the call from Apple’s teams around 10:30 p.m. on Friday. At this point, Montrose Search and Rescue teams were dispatched to the location of the accident.
Upon arrival, they heard the man screaming for help and located his totaled vehicle around 400 feet from the road. They used a helicopter to lower two rescuers to the car and found the man bleeding out from the head.
“I believe that if we didn’t have that good location information in a timely manner, he probably would’ve bled out,” Mike Leum, one of the members of Montrose Search and Rescue said. “I kept telling him how lucky he was.”
“He was 400 feet down in a canyon with virtually no way out,” said Steve Goldsworthy, the Rescue Operations Leader of Montrose Search and Rescue. “So, who knows when, or if, we would’ve located him. “The location that we got from the iPhone activation was spot on. It was basically his phone on its own, calling for help on his behalf.”
“Deputies say it may have been days before they learned of the crash, and even longer until they were able to locate him due to the remote location,” the report adds.
Since the iPhone 14 and Apple Wach Series 8 were released last fall, we’ve seen a number of stories highlighting Crash Detection and Emergency SOS via satellite’s success in the real world:
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