Smartphone maker Bullitt cuts staff as it moves to dial down costs
By Matthew Field
ONE of Britain’s few smartphone mak-
ers Bullitt Group has cut around a
quarter of its staff after its founders
bought the company back from the pri-
vate equity firm Exponent and began a
turnaround bid.
Bullitt, which develops “rugged”
mobile phones and sells them under li-
cence from brands like construction
firm Caterpillar and Land Rover, was
acquired by its founders Colin Batt,
Dave Floyd and Richard Wharton in
March after just 18 months in private
equity hands.
Exponent acquired a 63pc stake in
the smartphone maker for around
£100m in 2017, but the deal came at the
same time as a slump in sales from$200m (£163.5m) in 2017 to $151m in- Bullitt reported a loss of $38.7m
last year.
The founding trio have brought in
$5m in new investment from the Brit-
ish Growth Fund. Mr Batt said that
since they bought out Exponent the
company has returned to revenue
growth.
However, the Reading-headquar-
tered company was also forced to cut
around 50 staff.
“When we arrived there were over
200 people now we are down to 150
people,” Mr Batt said, “which was very
painful”.
He added: “One of the issues we have
right now is producing enough phones,
we have right-sized the overheads and
are refreshing the portfolio.”Founded in 2009, Bullitt has gained
a reputation for selling drop-proof
smartphones with sturdy designs for
use by engineers or in the outdoors.
However, the founders said under its
private equity ownership, the firm
moved to make more sales to busi-
nesses. Bullitt is now planning to con-
centrate more on consumer sales.
Mr Batt said: “We expect to seegrowth back in the revenue this year,
but certainly back into good profitabil-
ity by mid next year.”
The co-founders are currently
jointly running the business. Mr Whar-
ton added the company still saw de-
mand for rugged smartphones, despite
an overall downturn that has seen
smartphone sales slip for the biggest
players including Apple and Samsung.Boss of Uber rival Kapten
not fazed by car restrictions
By Michael O’DwyerTHE boss of a BMW-backed challenger
to Uber has shrugged off the threat of
restrictions on vehicles in central
London after MPs called for Britons
to ditch cars to achieve its zero
emissions goal.
Mariusz Zabrocki, London boss of
Kapten, a ride-hailing app co-owned
by BMW and fellow German automo-
tive giant Daimler, claimed the closure
of sections of central London to
traffic would not be a major difficulty
for his company as most of its business
comes from trips away from the heart
of the capital.
Twelve miles of roads in central
London will be closed to traffic on “Car
Free Day”, on Sept 22, to encourage
Londoners to walk, cycle and use
public transport.
“Even if there were further
restrictions, even if large parts of zone
one would be closed to cars, still
actually most of our customers are
using us outside the city centre,” Mr
Z abrocki told The Daily Telegraph.
His comments came after MPs called
last week for new measures to encour-
age Britons to ditch their cars in a bid to
ensure the UK meets its goal to elimi-
nate its net carbon emissions by 2050.
Parliament’s science and technology
select committee said replacing exist-ing vehicles with green alternatives
would not be enough to offset green-
house gases generated from transport.
“I don’t think we have enough
regulations to support reducing air
pollution,” said Mr Zabrocki, citing the
exemption of black cabs, which
compete with ride hailing apps, from
the congestion charge.
Kapten was already the second
largest taxi provider in Paris when it
launched in London in May. It reached
“comparable scale” to its Paris opera-
tion in just its second week in Lon-
don, Mr Zabrocki said. It is prepared to
run up large losses through promo-
tional pricing in a bid to gain market
share by the end of 2020. It does not
reveal detailed passenger or perfor-
mance figures but confirmed it has
signed up more than 16,000 drivers
and 500,000 users.
Kapten pays the central London
congestion charge for drivers who use
electric or hybrid cars to incentivise
them to switch to greener models.
These vehicles still have an environ-
mental impact through pollution from
their tyres and brakes, research from
Oxford academics has found.
But Mr Zabrocki said that eliminat-
ing the use of such vehicles was not
sensible as there needs to be a “balance
between basic needs and the
environment”.McKinsey marks digital shift
with change of headquarters
By Hannah Boland
THE management consultancy McKin-
sey has abandoned its headquarters in
London’s fusty St James’s area, as it
looks to ditch its image as a provider of
clipboard-wielding suits and rebrand
as a digital-savvy agent of change.
McKinsey has been based for the last
25 years in offices on Jermyn Street, an
area best known for bespoke men’s for-
mal shirts.
It said the move to the Post Building
in the so-called Knowledge Quarter,
around Holborn, would help it to ex-
pand its influence with clients, going
from “traditional strategy consulting”
into providing advice on “digital trans-
formation, advanced analytics, capabil-
ity building and design”.
Google and Facebook have also
based their British headquarters
nearby, and the area is home to some of
the UK’s leading universities as well
as the national institute for artificial
intelligence.
The new offices are located in a for-
mer Royal Mail sorting office that was
recently refurbished.
The attempt by McKinsey to broaden
out the services it can offer to clients,
and appeal to new types of companies,
comes as it looks to draw a line under
recent controversies.
The company has for years been
embroiled in a bitter battle with
turnaround specialist Jay Alix over its
bankruptcy work, spanning multiple
courts. Earlier this year, it agreed to
pay $15m (£12m) to end an investiga-
tion by the US Trustee into complaints
by Mr Alix.
It also faced questions over its ethicslast year, when a report in The New York
Times linked a study by McKinsey to a
crackdown in Saudi Arabia.
It claimed the consultancy had re-
leased a report into how the Saudi pub-
lic had responded to austerity
measures, in which it had named a
number of Twitter users who had been
vocal in their dislike of the measures.
One was reportedly later arrested.
McKinsey responded at the time by
saying it was “horrified by the possibil-
ity, however remote, that [its report]
could have been misused in any way”.
It said it was investigating the claims,
although added that the report had not
been commissioned by any authority
in Saudi Arabia, and that it was
intended primarily for “internal” use.Norse code Traffic lights in Aarhus, Denmark have had
their ‘green man’ tweaked to reflect the city’s Viking past.HENNING BAGGER/EPA-EFE/REXThe skills you
need to be a
babysitter for
self-driving cars
A
t a junction in downtown
Detroit, a self-driving car
stops beside a pedestrian
waiting to cross. Without
touching the car, an electric
shuttle operated by start-up
May Mobility, its safety driver Andrew
Dykman confidently waves the man
across the road.
“I have a pretty good idea of what the
car is going to do at any time. So I’m
letting him know that it’s waiting for
him. I guess it just comes from
experience,” he explains.
When a car in Uber’s self-driving
testing fleet struck and killed a woman
in Arizona last year, images of the safety
driver were beamed around the world.
The woman, Rafaela Vasquez, appears
to be looking down before gasping in
shock and grabbing the wheel as the
pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, is hit. A
police report concluded that she had
been watching The Voice on her phone.
The incident put the spotlight on a
mysterious and new line of work.
Sitting in the driver’s seat and keeping
an eye on a self-driving car in training
wasn’t anyone’s job 10 years ago (apart
from perhaps a handful of Google
engineers). Now, there are hundreds,
potentially thousands, worldwide.
Companies send their partially
developed cars out in public to collect
data and to examine how they react to
real-life situations. Since none of them
are yet fully autonomous, they need a
human babysitter.
It’s a strange job sitting in the driver’s
seat of a semi-autonomous car and
making sure it doesn’t veer off the road
or hit anything. It sounds simple but it
can also be exhausting, lonely and
potentially dangerous.
“We all know that it’s a difficult thing
to [do] monotonous driving for eight
hours, even when you’re doing the
driving. So imagine that, now, your task
is to maintain complete awareness
while someone else is driving. That is a
very difficult thing for any human,”
says Eric Paul Dennis, of
independent non-profit the Centre for
Automotive Research.
“There is a higher cognitive load
doing this than driving all the time,
because you’re thinking about what
says, “have proven to be some of our
really robust, well-adjusted, mission
specialists” (its term for safety drivers),
as they are used to following structured
plans and detailed instructions.
Smaller start-ups have teams with
engineering or technical knowledge,
who supervise the cars as well as
detecting or fixing problems. Ned
Boykov is an experienced mechanical
engineer, originally from Bulgaria, who
has worked for Silicon Valley self-
driving start-up AiMotive for just over a
year as a test and integration engineer.
“I kind of feel like the car is
something I’m connected to. I already
know the system and know the
limitations,” he says. “You have to be a
very responsible person to be able to do
this job. Not only a good driver, because
you can be a good driver, but not
paying much attention to everything
surrounding you for a quick part of the
second, and something can go wrong.”
Many of May Mobility’s “fleet
attendants” are local students with an
interest in the technology, and it also
likes to hire veterans and retired
engineers. “Those are the ideal people
that we found, people who are
intelligent and motivated, and excitedabout what we’re doing,” says Dykman.
An expired job advert for Waymo,
which began life as Google’s self-driving
car project, stipulates that candidates
must be 21 years old, have no more than
one point on their licence, have no
drunk or drug-driving convictions, or
ever been at fault for a road accident
that caused injury or death.
Joseph Rooney, chief executive of
Denver-based firm Elevation Proving
Grounds, which sources safety drivers
for both car companies and lorry
companies, says asking for a clean
driving record is common.
“They need to be safety-oriented
people, because it’s a very critical
position for autonomous vehicles. If
things go wrong it makes a dent on the
company [and] on the industry.”
Many of the people he recruits to test
self-driving lorries are experienced
long-distance HGV drivers excited at
the chance to go home every night,
instead of spending weeks on the road,
while applicants to work in cars are
often students or recent graduates who
are looking for a way into the industry,
or desk-bound career-changers tired of
the “daily grind”.
“Some people, they do have a collegeeducation, and maybe their college
education isn’t relevant to AVs
(autonomous vehicles), so they use the
driver position as a way to break into
the industry,” he says.
Jesse Clifton worked in retail before
becoming a vehicle operator for Uber.
He has now spent two and a half years
behind the wheel of self-driving cars,
originally at the taxi app firm in
Pittsburgh, and now at Silicon Valley
start-up Voyage, where he works as
dispatch lead, organising the cars and
the testing process.
“I don’t even think I get that much of
an adrenalin rush anymore,” he says.
“The first few times, like in Pittsburgh,
if something happened your heart
would really start racing, you’d pull
over for a few minutes and calm down.
But after experiencing it so much – you
take over if you need to, and you move
through those scenarios safely, and
then you just continue on.”
His worst fear? Other (human)
drivers. “I was honestly more worried
about somebody rear-ending me,
versus somebody appearing in front of
me, or a car running a red light. I was
more afraid of the distracted people
behind me.”Keeping watch on an
autonomous vehicle
sounds simple, but
can be exhausting
and potentially
dangerous, finds
Olivia Rudgard
the car [will] do,” says Dykman,
who is May Mobility’s technical
programme manager.
A car that can safely deal with all
situations doesn’t yet exist, and its
human supervisor is still responsible
for everything it does. This means the
safety driver has to pay close attention
to what is happening around them,
while not actually doing anything for
long periods of time. Several
companies, including May, put limits
on the length of time people can
continuously be in the drivers seat,
normally around two hours.
Of course, piloting a cutting-edge
semi-autonomous car for hours each
day on public roads was always going to
be a risky job. But Uber’s accident
brought the risks into sharper relief.
Uber spokeswoman Sarah Abboud
says the company has focused on
reducing driver fatigue, telling drivers
that they can come back to base at any
time if they feel tired or if something is
wrong with the car, and always having
two drivers in the car (the driver who
crashed was alone at the time).
It also keeps a closer eye on its safety
drivers. Companies that detect
distracted driving by looking at body
position and eye gaze are increasingly
selling their products to self-driving car
companies. “We have a driver
monitoring system, so we’re actually
able in real time to know if, say for
example, a safety driver behind the
wheel is looking down for an extended
period of time or not paying attention
to the road,” she says.
Public transport company Transdev,
which is developing self-driving
shuttles, has advertised for a self-
driving vehicle operator in Phoenix,
Arizona, paid $20 (£16.35) per hour,
who can “operate a vehicle 6-8 hours a
day alone, five days a week; able to sit
still for long periods of time”.
The company said it uses cameras to
detect driver attention levels and
encourages them to ask for someone
else to take over if they are tired,
without fear of repercussion.
“It is important to note that fatigue
and distracted driving are not new
problems. As a transport operator,
Transdev has always needed to do all
we can to make sure our drivers are
focused and alert,” it said.
As members of the public begin to
take rides in self-driving cars, safety
drivers are also one of the few human
faces of this new technology, so they’re
also taught how to answer curious
questions from the public, something
almost all drivers have dealt with at
some point. “I’ve seen people in Audi
R8s drive by us and look at our cars,
and I’m like – ‘you’re looking at me?’”
says Dykman.
According to Uber, people with
military backgrounds make particularly
great safety drivers. Veterans, Abboud‘I kind of
feel like
the car is
somethingwhich I’m
connected to.
I alreadyknow the
system andknow the
limitations’‘They need to
be safety-
oriented,
because it’s avery critical
position to
autonomousvehicles. If
things gowrong it
makes a
dent on thecompany’
Technology Intelligence
TEAM WOOSH FOR THE TELEGRAPH /GETTY/CAR CULTURE‘The move to the Knowledge
Quarter, around Holborn,
would help it to expand itsinfluence with clients’
The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 27 August 2019 *** 31
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