Apple’s addition of Crash Detection to its latest Apple Watches and iPhones has caused quite a stir, and early testing has shown it to work pretty well. But a new round of tests carried out by the Wall Street Journal shows that Crash Detection isn’t as flawless as we might have hoped.
In fact, in a number of tests, the Crash Detection feature simply refused to work at all.
No crashes detected
The video, which we’ve embedded below, is as entertaining as you might have come to expect from a WSJ project. In it, we see a derby champion repeatedly drive his vehicle into cars in a scrap yard to see whether Crash Detection kicked in, or not. He was wearing an Apple Watch Ultra and had an iPhone in the car with him — as well as a Google Pixel with its own, similar crash-detecting technology.
During the tests, the iPhone and Apple Watch performed well — beginning the calls to emergency services as expected. Things were less impressive for the Pixel, but it’s the car that was crashed into that will cause most concern.
Inside that car, the WSJ placed an iPhone 14 Pro Max and another Pixel, with neither phones ever registering any kind of impact. The Crash Detection feature didn’t kick in once, no matter how many times the vehicle was smacked into. A second vehicle was tested with the same results, too.
When questioned on the results, both Google and Apple said that the reason for the lack of any emergency calls or crash detection was likely down to a lack of data. The companies believe that their devices didn’t realize they were in a vehicle for various reasons, including a lack of travel distance prior to the crash itself.
As disappointing as the results are, this is the first time we’ve seen Crash Detection fail. And it did work as expected when the device was in the car that did the actual crashing. The moral of the story? Make sure you’re the one that’s crashing into things if you want to be sure Crash Detection will fire, at least based on these findings.
