The invention relates to a method for operating a motor vehicle, in which an emergency call of the motor vehicle is made and, through the emergency call, image data from at least one camera of the motor vehicle and state data from at least one vehicle component, which differs from the camera of the motor vehicle are sent out to a vehicle-external facility, wherein the state data is, before being conveyed to the vehicle-external facility, embedded into an image signal formed from the image data in accordance with a predetermined image coding standard, and the image signal with the embedded state data is sent out to the vehicle-external facility.