Your iPhone May Soon Be Able to Call For Help After a Car Accident

The iPhone and Apple Watch already provide some great life-saving safety features, from Emergency SOS to Fall Detection. Now it looks like Apple is planning to take that to the next level sometime next year, with several updates that will allow your iPhone to automatically take action if it detects that you’ve been in a car crash.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler (via Apple News+), Apple is planning to add a safety feature to have your iPhone automatically dial 911 when it detects the kind of motion associated with a vehicular collision.

The concept would be similar to how Fall Detection works on the Apple Watch. However, the sensors would be more accurately tailored toward car accidents, and it would work on the iPhone, too, bringing an important safety feature to those who don’t own an Apple Watch.

According to Winkler, Apple plans to roll it out as a specific product featured called “crash detection.” It would use sensors such as the accelerometer to detect things like a sudden spike in gravitational forces resulting from a hard impact.

To be clear, as with most early reports like this, it’s not yet a sure thing that Apple will implement it next year, and it may never come at all. However, Apple has already been studying ways to do this for some time through data collected anonymously from Apple Watch and iPhone users worldwide.

In fact, Winkler reports that Apple’s products have already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts, over 50,000 of which included a call to 911.

According to documents seen by the WSJ, Apple has been correlating that data since a high-impact event recorded by the iPhone’s sensors and immediately followed by a 911 call suggests that the data actually did come from a car crash.

This also provides some interesting insight into the type of data that Apple is collecting from iPhone users without their express knowledge. To be fair, users consent to Apple collecting all of this sensor data — and the company says it does so with complete anonymity — but it probably hasn’t occurred to most people that Apple is tracking things like impacts and 911 calls.

Google Did It First

Apple technically isn’t the first company to come up with this specific idea. Google introduced it to its Pixel smartphone back in 2019. There are also several third-party apps on the App Store that provide similar automatic crash detection through AI and location tracking.

Of course, the idea of using accelerometers and gyroscopes to detect impacts isn’t at all original. For instance, in-car services like GM’s OnStar have offered features like “automatic crash response” for over two decades and reportedly handle over 6,000 crash notifications per month.

However, it’s also fair to say that Apple pioneered Fall Detection on the Apple Watch, which came to its wearable back in 2018. The Fall Detection feature has detected car crashes on a few occasions, but that’s also not what it’s designed to do. This new “crash detection” feature would adjust the sensors more specifically to measure the kind of impact motion that’s directly associated with higher-speed collisions.

If crash detection does indeed materialize, it’s hard to say if it will come as a software update or require new hardware that will only be found in upcoming iPhone and Apple Watch models. While a more cynical take is that Apple will try to use this as leverage to sell new hardware, we prefer to believe that the company actually wants to bring this to as many people as possible. Since the iPhone has had advanced accelerometers for years, that shouldn’t be too difficult.