There was a small and relatively unsuccessful F1 racing team around about 10 years ago, who's name I shall not say here. Internally such teams were known as "pit dodgers".

When it came to the design of their gearbox, the work was outsourced (as much of it is in F1 unless you are Ferrari).

The primary gearbox designer did most of the work, however reverse gear proved to be a problem, but rather than fix the problem, it was left to the junior designer who couldn't solve it either, who also left it pretty much unfunctional. This was based on the concept that:

a) Reverse is rarely (if ever needed) (sidenote: disqualified if used in the pits during a race)

b) The "pit dodger" team was unlikely to last the entire race anyway, so the gearbox didn't need to standup to a full race duration anyway. The effort put in to designing the components (i.e. precision) can be reduced to match the expectation of success and failure rate of other third party components. Design and production time can be saved and extra profit made.

Thus lies the lesson of the emergency call feature, or any other feature that designers feel don't really require that much attention because they are rarely used. These features are often handed to junior developers and engineers, because of the fact that people have a tendency to deem lesser-used features as unimportant.

Which is fine of course until you have an emergency and you desparately need to make that emergency call because your, or someone else's life, depends on it. Or you need to reverse out of the way of a damn F1 car coming towards you at 150mph down a straight and you are sitting in the middle of the track. WTF, reverse doesn't engage....oh shiiiiiiit....

TLDR: Features that are very infrequently used are not always the features of least importance.