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It’s always nice when you find out a safety feature works as intended, and luckily for Apple, that seems to be what its iPhone crash detection feature does. After driving his vehicle 400 feet off a cliff on Friday, a man’s iPhone detected the drop and alerted emergency services, ultimately saving his life.
Mike Leum, a search-and-rescue responder in Los Angeles, took to Twitter over the weekend to explain what had happened. He shared that late on Friday night, his team was alerted to an incident on Mount Wilson Red Box Road, a scenic yet dangerously curvy 4.7-mile stretch along the San Gabriel Mountains. The alert had come from an iPhone 14’s crash detection feature. Upon arrival, Leum and his colleagues discovered a driver had gone 400 feet over a cliff.
The car had been totaled, and the driver was bleeding. The search-and-rescue crew called in a helicopter from the Los Angeles County Fire Department Air Operations Section, which airlifted the driver to a nearby medical center for emergency treatment. The driver had suffered head trauma and “would have bled out” if his iPhone hadn’t alerted emergency services, according to Leum.
Apple first introduced crash detection with the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro in Sept. 2022. The feature quickly became the butt of many jokes, and for good reason. The phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer work with the microphone, GPS, and barometer to detect phenomena from changes in G force to alarming sounds. When the right—or, for the user, wrong—conditions are met, the phone triggers a crash alert on the screen. If the user doesn’t respond to the alert on their phone or connected Apple Watch within 20 seconds, the phone initiates a call to 9-1-1, reaches out to the user’s emergency contacts, and displays the user’s medical information (if they’ve set it up) on-screen. That’s all great on paper, but vehicle collisions aren’t the only things capable of rapid acceleration, deceleration, or changes in G’s—roller coasters are, too, as well as your run-of-the-mill accidental smartphone drop.
This time, it appears the feature’s sensitivity is its superpower. “The location that we got from the iPhone activation was spot on,” Steve Goldsworthy, rescue operations leader of Montrose Search and Rescue, told CBS. “It was basically his phone on its own, calling for help on his behalf.”
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