Man thanks CEO Tim Cook after Apple Watch Series 8 saves his life

Nolan Abel’s car struck a telephone pole at 70 miles per hour on October 15, 2022. While he was fighting to stay conscious, Abel felt the haptic feedback of the Apple Watch and heard it asking if he was there.

“So I’m just like in my seat, but fighting to stay conscious,” Abel told ABC News. “I’m fading in and out and then I feel a little haptic on the watch and I know that if I don’t interfere with it, it’s going to call EMS. And then I hear like, ‘Hello. Are you there?’

When he did not respond in a timely manner, the Watch alerted the emergency services, who arrived at the location.

“If it weren’t for this watch, who knows how long it would have been for help to get to me,” Nolan told ABC News. “Someone would have found me eventually, but this had EMS to me in five minutes.”

After recovering from the injuries, Abel contacted Apple CEO Tim Cook and thanked him for saving his life. He wrote an email to which Cook replied saying that this is exactly why Apple developed the crash detection feature.

“I emailed Tim Cook and Tim Cook emailed me,” said Abel, “and it was a short and sweet email — he’s a busy man.” “Tim said that he was so sorry that this happened to me,” he continued, “that this is exactly why they developed the crash detection feature,” he added.

When your Apple Watch detects a severe car crash, it will display an alert and automatically initiate an emergency phone call after 20 seconds unless you cancel. If you are unresponsive, it will play an audio message for emergency services, which informs them that you’ve been in a severe car crash and gives them your latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates with an approximate search radius. The feature is on by default.