The newly announced Apple Watch Series 8 and iPhone 14 series will be able to detect if you’ve been involved in a car crash.
The Crash detection feature will be available on the smart watch thanks to two sensors that detect impacts and will automatically connect the person wearing it to emergency services, passing along their location information. It will also notify your emergency contacts.
The sensors enabling this gesture include a three-axis gyroscope and a high G-force accelerometer. The new sensors will also be included in the new iPhone 14 series of phones. The phone will work with the Apple Watch’s sensors, but it will also independently detect a car crash whether or not an Apple Watch is present.
In addition to the new hardware, the microphone, GPS, and barometer on the watch now take continuous readings. The data is fed into machine learning to detect when a car crash happens. Apple noted that all data is kept locally on the hardware and is only processed at the time of the crash.
Apple trained the devices on more than 1 billion hours of driving and crash data to make the feature possible. According to the company, it spent years studying vehicle impacts in crash test labs, focusing on four major types of crashes: front, side, rear-end, and rollover.
Apple said the Watch Series 8 will cost $399 for the GPS model and $499 for the cellular model. The new Watch SE will cost $249 for the GPS model and $299 for the cellular model. Orders for both will begin on Wednesday ahead of the launch on Sept. 16.
