Accidental eCall activation in cars lead to 75% false 112 calls in Nederland

My Samsung phone was very trigger happy about emergency calls, in India. Once, the call went through, and it seems the service provider prepared for people like me: it would proceed only if I press a number.

I had a big crash last year in The Netherlands on the highway. Before I realized what happened, the car had auto-dialed the emergency number and I was talking to emergency services literally 5 seconds after the crash. They helped to get the appropriate help within a few minutes. Very thankful for the Ecall, didn’t even realize I had this installed.

People underestimate the dangers erroneous emergency calls do. Here in germany they automated the emergency call system for the firefighters, thus every person smoking indoors at a public bath would trigger a huge alarm, instead of a "call in and scout ahead" by the comander of the brigade with devastating results on volunteer firefighter numbers. You do not sacrifice your weekend for some datadriven bureaucrats efficiency wank, you would sacrifice it for the community. So they quit in droves. What set out to improve on paper destroyed un practice.

I feel like the title is misleading. It's not 75% of the false calls to 112 originating from eCall activation.

There's 3.5 millions calls to 112 per year. Out of these, 1 million were not transferred further to the emergency services.

There's been 37.500 calls to 112 originating from the eCall system. About 28.000 of them were not redirected to the emergency service.

So, the eCall system helped in about 10.000 cases, and contributed 2.8% of the non-emergency calls to the 112.

I'm not surprised. I bought a new car in January, and I was unaware of this feature until I read the user manual.

All the ideas and regulations introduced by the European Union over the last 10 years regarding cars have been bad, they have done more harm than good and have unnecessarily increased car prices. We should return to the standards from 10 years ago, they were more reasonable and based on common sense. But I guess this is the consequence of politicians and bureucrats living in the ivory tower.