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Crash detection reliable?

Hi, had a pretty nasty crash a couple of weeks back. Emergency services needed 45 minutes to locate me. Currently using a Edge 1000 considering upgrading to 1030 just to get the crash detection. Is this function reliable? Many false alarms an such?
/Frode
  • Crash détection does work. I crashed for real twice with it enabled and it did its thing every time. I was not hurt and cancelled every time. Now it does also produce false alarms sometimes when I brake hard or bang the Edge for example. It does not send the message immediately and provide a dialogue that gives you 30sec to cancel by pressing and holding a button on the screen. So from my experience it does work fine. The false alarms now and then are not a bit deal for me I just cancel them before the message is sent. You should brief your contacts on what this is all about and how it works, maybe with triggering an alarm to see what the message looks like, if you want them to react appropriately when it happens for real. The feature needs cell coverage to work obviously hence not usefulll in remote locations.
  • Just a query, did your emergency contact call you on your mobile to verify you were in an incident? If not, that's putting a lot of faith in the device. If so, you could probably have called them instead.

  • I agree with the majority of the other comments, in that it's just not reliable enough to use in an emergency, and if you're able to verify with your emergency contact that you've been in an incident, you're probably able to do that anyway without an alarm.
    I'd love to be advised if this is ever looked into, and has one or all of the following:

    • A very easy to find 'cancel' button regardless of what screen you're on.
    • A longer timeout allowing your incident to be cancelled if you start moving again.
    • A way of using the devices' orientation, or the connected phones' orientation, to show if it's recently changed by 90 degrees.
    • A way of re-texting all your emergency contacts that you're okay, before they all start calling ambulances while you're riding.
    • A 'behind the scenes' big data dump of how many times it goes off, whether 'cancel' was pressed, and if the rider kept moving after, to make it more reliable.

    Until any of these are true, I'm switching it off.

  • In the past I did have indeed false alarms after hard braking in front of the traffic lights, but was always able to cancel. I think that was more than a year ago. With newer firmware updates it became a lot more reliable so that I can't remember when was the last time I had false positive.

    At the other hand, when I actually crashed last year in November and was on the ground in a lot of pain (broken collarbone... again), I was super happy Garmin did send out a notification! My wife tried calling me like 3 times and I just couldn't pick up the call as the phone as well flew away from my pocket, so eventually based on the location sent she was able to come pick me up.

    I would NEVER disable this feature!

    Just my thoughts and experience...

  • Hard braking like at a stop light that changes right in front of you will trigger it.   I had to disable it as when it did trigger it killed livetrack for the rest of the ride.   My observation is that it's an unreliable Safety feature that kills another twitchy safety feature.  Double whammy.  As others have mentioned, it's still in the gimmick phase.  Not sure if they'll be able to make it work right with the 1030 hardware.  Maybe the 1040 will have a couple more accelerometers to properly detect a crash and not depend on just one sensor.  Right now it seems like it's a 737-Max, not enough sensor data to make a safety determination.

  • just medium-hard braking sets it off which is very annoying.   BUT - Actually dropping the bike in any fashion I understand and it's legit.  In my top 3 accidents is the one where I hit a stick at the "perfect" angle starting out with no speed, and WHAM, hit the pavement head first and wondering how bad the damage was to my skull... 

  • My experience is that it is reliable in the sense that there are no false negative. It will detect a crash. There are however false negatives when you end up stopping hard, in which case you have 30sec to cancel if. Works reasonably well on the road. Not useful on a trail or MTB, just to easily false detects.