Crash detection reliable?

Forget about 1030, you can not trust this feature.
Buy Spot or similar professional device, if you're so scared and need it.

I have tested the crash detection for mountain biking. It's absolutely useless, every hard stop in steep terrain was detected as accident and an alarm message was sent of. Typically on such rides it's not possible to take a hand of the handlebar to fiddle with the Edge in order to abort the alarm message. The Edge does obviously not have (or not use) any sensor to detect if the bike is still in an upright position or not. I like the idea of the crash detection with automatic messaging as I often do trails on my own. But the implementation of Garmin is far from usable at this moment, at least for XC biking.

Hahaha - this is completely junk and nothing but smart marketing. Unfortunately it's useless since all it takes is a hard braking to set the alert off.

Edit: this was on my roadbike

Well unfortunately on 8.18.18 I had the unlucky chance to verify that the incident detection does work! I was T-boned by a car and suffered 3 compression vertebrae fractures, a fractured rib and collapsed left lung. While I was laying in the fetal position on the road, I clearly heard my 1030 chirping away as it had detected the accident and it did notify my gf who was an emergency contact of mine. It worked for me and I am very thankful for this particular feature. I just hope no one else out there will ever need it but I'm certainly glad I did it and worked flawlessly.

I've had false positives on incident detection the last few rides I was on ... as I was rolling up to my home.

I've disabled it ... chalking it up as a gimmick.

I've had similar experiences with false positives. My driveway has a bit of lip up from the street. If I pass over this lip at much speed, then slow to a stop in or in front of my garage, the deceleration is enough for the Edge 1030 to detect an incident. Since I once let it send notices, and one other time had to turn off the notice, I have disabled incident detection. Nevertheless, I saw a message a couple of days ago that an incident was detected, but no message could be sent. (Thank goodness!)

I believe that incident detection would work if I ever have a genuine accident, but I cannot bother my wife and friends with false messages, so I am not using the feature. If it gets improved, I'll turn it back on.

False neg for me. Braking very hard from 28 mph to 0 set it off. This, despite that 2 seconds after avoiding the cretin in the citroen I was back riding at 16mh going around a large roundabout. Bizarrely although I'd cancelled the first attempt to notify 3 people of Garmin's legendary '1030 incompetence' it set about ignoring my restored progress and making sure the 3 now knew all about this latest failing. I had to stop and take three calls from anxious family and gf. Battery life was around 16% at that point which may explain why the audio warning did not sound 2nd time though all it would need is enough power to send the messages so WTF?. Really, such a facility should recognise that my movement was consistent with cycling.
On reflection, I suppose I could have been dragged down the road by a vehicle, but having cancelled surely that should override all else? It is right to err on the side of caution but there should be better safeguards like are you now stationery and is the bike more or less vertical. My 'see sense light' detects acceleration, deceleration and crucially 'position relative to vertical' before deciding to flash faster as a warning to others that I'm doing something different; thist is absolutely instantaneous and the light costs <10% of the edge1030.

Incident detection works when you have a real accident, that is the main point and I unfortunately experience this. I had a false alarm before with a 820 (the bike fall by itself) and did not reacted quickly enough to cancel the messages, I was able to cancel the second false alarm on time to prevent alarming messages (this time I dropped my bike to hard for a pee stop).
Having a sensitivity adjustment could be nice....

You have to trust such a function in 100 % or not at all.
This one can not be trusted because it is completely unpredictable.

Well unfortunately on 8.18.18 I had the unlucky chance to verify that the incident detection does work! I was T-boned by a car and suffered 3 compression vertebrae fractures, a fractured rib and collapsed left lung. While I was laying in the fetal position on the road, I clearly heard my 1030 chirping away as it had detected the accident and it did notify my gf who was an emergency contact of mine. It worked for me and I am very thankful for this particular feature. I just hope no one else out there will ever need it but I'm certainly glad I did it and worked flawlessly.

Hope you are recovering fine and soon on the bike again.. I'm still on crutches from my crash August 12th, Recovery is a slow process (: