Having announced plans to expand the availability of SYNC AppLink functionality to Taiwan, New Zealand, and Thailand at Computex 2014, Ford Motor Company has also announced plans to introduce its SYNC Emergency Assistance technology to Taiwan.
“Our customers are going to love bringing their favorite apps into their cars using the AppLink platform, and our Emergency Assistance technology has reassured drivers in markets all over the globe with its first responder capabilities”, said Trevor Worthington, vice president, Product Development, Ford Asia Pacific.
The Blue Oval seems to be on a mission to prove its commitment to Asia Pacific market, stating in a news release that “the introduction of Emergency Assistance to Taiwan is further proof of Ford’s commitment to bring more of its innovative technologies to Taiwan and the Asia Pacific region.”
Already available in 9 million Ford vehicles worldwide, the Emergency Assistance technology uses the Ford SYNC platform and the customer’s cell phone to place phone calls to emergency operators in the event of an accident.
The system begins working once a driver has paired their phone with SYNC, and enabled Emergency Assistance. The service runs for the entire lifetime of the vehicle without any necessary registration or subscription fees, unless manually disabled by the driver.
In the event of an accident where an airbag is deployed or the emergency fuel pump shut off is triggered, the Emergency Assistance technology begins a 10-second countdown during which the driver can cancel the call if emergency response is not necessary. If the call is not cancelled, the system will connect with the emergency operators and inform them of the accident while providing the GPS location coordinates.
Ford has also built logic into the Emergency Assistance setup to identify if the driver is using the phone at the time of the accident. If the system identifies this to be the case, it will disconnect the call in progress and initiate the emergency call. Conveniently, the connection to emergency operators cannot be interrupted by any incoming calls. Additionally, if the driver leaves the vehicle while connected to emergency operators, the driver can take the phone with them and continue the call while moving away from the vehicle.
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