There are a few good reasons for the lag. First, today’s school buses are already remarkably safe, thanks to a combination of vehicle design (rollover protection, protective seats, and high crush standards) and laws that afford special protection to school bus passengers. (It’s illegal, for example, to pass a school bus while it’s dropping off or picking up passengers.) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports kids are 70 percent more likely to get to school safely if they hitch a ride on school bus instead of with mom or dad. Fewer than six American school-age children die inside school transportation vehicles each year.

Add in the fact that school districts typically have to scrounge for funding anyway, and you’ve got bus tech that’s a few years behind. “Not that new technologies are outrageously expensive, but obviously with school districts you’re using taxpayer money,” says Andersky. “The basic argument is, we’re not having crashes. Why spend on technology?”

In fact, kids are most at risk when they’re boarding or alighting buses, not when they’re riding them, according to federal data. That’s why the small Hannah concept would drop kids off right in front of their houses, so students wouldn't have to cross the street at all. The Teague designers say the pod’s small size lets it skip the traditional school bus stop and spoke-and-hub routing network. More and smaller vehicles could mean quicker and more convenient trips to and from school—not to mention later wake-up times—especially in less dense areas, like the suburbs.

The studio envisions Hannah recognizing kids by their faces, to ensure only the right ones board the mini bus. It could even warn activity-happy students that, hey, today's Tuesday—head to the field for soccer practice, not into me. And because school buses face the same low utilization problem as most personal cars—they're generally used for just two trips a day—the designers say the pods could be used to, say, deliver Amazon packages during the day. (Teague says it's still puzzling through how it might clean the things between trips.)

That's all way in the future, just like autonomous vehicles themselves. The stopgap solution toward a safer school bus would be simpler tech, like blindspot detection. While you can buy that sort of collision warning system on many new cars—and retrofit it onto old ones—that kind of heads up isn’t available in school buses yet. It likely won’t be for another few years, says Andersky.

Then there's the people part of all this. Drivers don't just work the steering wheel and pedals. They're charged with monitoring the 50-odd, squirmy tykes for the durations of their trips, and liaising between demanding school districts and difficult parents. The median driver pay is under $30,000 a year, so no wonder nearly a quarter of school transportation companies say they face a "severe" driver shortage. Teague suggests that job could be better—even better paid—if the school bus driver becomes more of a fleet manager, monitoring multiple pods' worth of kids from afar as they motor toward class.

"The school bus industry would be well-served to look at this," says Liddell. "While they might initially recoil at it, what does it mean for the next 10, 15 years of pupil transportation?" The design studio has no immediate plans to actually build Hannah, but it's fun to ponder, and think about additional details that need to be worked out. For example: Where would the cool kids sit on a bi-directional bus?

RoboThings