You can now get your hands on Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 14, which comes with a bevy of slightly better features than the last iPhone. But there’s one new feature that stands out: Crash Detection, and it might just save your life. That is, if it works.
Crash Detection is available now on the iPhone 14 and the new Apple Watch. Here’s how it works, according to Gizmodo:
The 14 also includes new crash detection technology which Apple has also integrated into the new Apple Watch. The feature leverages the phone’s gyroscope, sensors and machine learning to detect if you’ve been in a car crash and automatically calls emergency services to your location while also notifying your emergency contacts.
To find out if the iPhone can really detected crashes, the intrepid YouTube channel TechRax decided to crash a remote-controlled Mercury Grand Marquis into a pile of less identifiable parts of rusty and burnt-out vehicles. The channel posted its findings to YouTube this week and the results are in: If you tape an iPhone 14 to the headrest of a Mercury Grand Marquis and crash that car into things, the Crash Detection feature seems to work!
Is it science? Not really. The post says “Video was filmed in a safe and controlled environment” but it seems to just be a field with other discarded vehicles in it. There aren’t any rescue vehicles should something go wrong, and the car does seem to veer off track a few times. Also, is that a skateboard being used as a part of the remote driving rig?
But this is the kind of fun, interesting and destructive experiment that makes for entertaining YouTube viewing. TechRax’s remarkable 7.6 million subscribers have watched these folks drop an iPhone 13 Pro down a 150-foot waterfall and an iPhone 6s into a lava flow.
Why? Why not! It may look like a couple of boys having fun crashing things in a field, but there’s almost an absurdist artistic value to putting these expensive objects we’ve come to overvalue and depend on in such extreme scenarios. I’m here for it.