Your Galaxy S24 could soon detect when you're in a car crash (2024)

Getting hit by another car is one of the last things you want to happen to you while you’re on the road, but it sadly happens all too frequently. If you do end up as a victim in a car crash, it’s crucial that emergency responders and your loved ones get informed ASAP about your situation. Unfortunately, in more severe crashes, you might not be physically capable of calling 911 or your loved ones, which is why many cars can automatically call emergency services when they detect a crash. Not every car can do that, though, so having a phone that can do the same thing could genuinely save your life one day.

Google’s Pixel phones since the Pixel 4 and Apple’s iPhones since the iPhone 14 have been able to detect car crashes, while Samsung’s smartphones like the Galaxy S24 series and Galaxy Z Fold 5 currently can’t. However, that could change in the future, as we’ve spotted evidence that the Galaxy S24 as well as the Galaxy Z Fold 5 might be capable of detecting when you’re in a car crash.

For a bit of context, every Android device is equipped with a multitude of physical sensors, such as an accelerometer and a gyroscope. These sensors provide data that the Android OS and apps can read from to power simple features like autorotation as well as more complex ones like Android’s earthquake alerts. Your phone can infer when it’s in a car crash by analyzing sensor data from its motion sensors, its GPS, and its microphone. However, the reason so few phones offer car crash detection is because actually analyzing that data is complicated, potentially power-hungry if not done right, and requires care (to not upset regulators/emergency services).

Car crash detection on a Pixel 8 Pro

To solve these problems, car crash detection on Pixel phones utilize the phone’s low-power sensor hub hardware to continuously collect and analyze sensor data. Only when a potential car crash is detected does the phone’s more power-hungry main applications processor wake up to confirm the result and then trigger the car crash alert. Google has been trying to get Android OEMs to use its implementation of car crash detection, but the company hasn’t had any success thus far. While we don’t have evidence that Samsung is working to adopt Google’s implementation of car crash detection, we do have evidence that its working on a car crash detection feature of some sort.

A couple of months ago, I was messing with the Tasker app on my Galaxy Z Fold 5 to fix an issue I was having: I wanted to switch to make Gboard the default keyboard on the cover screen but keep Samsung Keyboard as the default keyboard on the inner screen. One solution I came up with was to use Tasker to read data from the hinge angle sensor and then change the default keyboard app accordingly. To my surprise, when the Tasker app listed all the sensors available on my Galaxy Z Fold 5, I found a “Car Crash Detect Wakeup” sensor in the list. This was a shocking discovery, because Samsung currently doesn’t offer a car crash detection feature on any of its Galaxy phones.

Car Crash Detect Wakeup sensor found on the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy S24 Ultra

This “Car Crash Detect Wakeup” sensor is also present on my Galaxy S24 Ultra but not on a Galaxy S23 Ultra unit that we checked. Digging deeper, I learned that this “Car Crash Detect Wakeup” sensor is actually a composite sensor, a type of virtual sensor that processes and fuses data from one or more underlying physical sensors. The sensor is designed to not allow for batching sensor events so as to immediately report potential car crashes to apps reading the sensor.

Speaking of which, we discovered a hidden system app in One UI 6.1 called “MoccaMobile” that contains code for starting and stopping the car crash sensor. However, we weren’t able to find any UI for what a potential car crash alert might look like on Samsung devices. Further complicating matters is the fact that this “MoccaMobile” app can be found in older builds of One UI; for instance, the app is present in the One UI 5.1.1 build for the Galaxy Z Fold 5 as well as in the One UI 6.0 build for the Galaxy S23 Ultra, the latter of which doesn’t even seem to have this “Car Crash Detect Wakeup” sensor. The app isn’t present in the One UI 5.0 build for the Galaxy S22 Ultra or the One UI 5.1 build for the Galaxy S23 Ultra, however.

We contacted Samsung last week to see if they’d like to comment on our finding, but we have not heard back from them yet. If Samsung is indeed working on a car crash detection feature for the Galaxy S24 series and Galaxy Z Fold 5, then it can’t come soon enough, because it could potentially save the lives of a decent number of people given how popular these phones are.