Riding a school bus is the safest way to get to and from school.  Unfortunately, accidents involving school buses still happen, with most of them occurring outside the school bus. A study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2015 found that, of the injuries or deaths relating to school bus accidents, eight percent were passengers on the school bus while 20 percent were pedestrians or children outside the school bus. The rest of the casualties were passengers in other vehicles.

“These statistics are shocking,” said Caley Edgerly, president and CEO of Thomas Built Buses. “We do everything we can to ensure that passengers on our school buses are as safe as possible.  But what happens outside the school bus has always seemed to be out of our control.  That’s why we are working diligently on technologies that will make the area surrounding the school bus a little safer. While we can’t control other vehicles, at least we are giving school bus drivers a bit more control over what happens outside their buses.”

As part of this mission, Thomas Built Buses partnered with MITO Corporation in 2015 to develop the Perimeter View™ 360 camera package (PV360), which is part of Thomas Built’s BusWise® suite of technologies. Since then, the PV360 has been increasingly popular among Thomas Built customers.

The PV360 is factory-installed on new Saf-T-Liner® C2 school buses.  This state-of-the-art camera was the first of its kind in the industry and is still the only package that provides a 360-degree bird’s-eye view all the way around the exterior of the bus. Unlike other cameras in the marketplace that provide images on split screens, the PV360 camera shows full visibility all the way around the bus with screens that are stitched together to create one image.

To ensure a complete view, high-resolution wide-angle cameras are installed in the front, back, left and right sides of the school bus. These four cameras provide the driver with crisp, real-time video images of everything that is happening outside the bus, without constantly switching views.  And, if the driver needs a closer look, he or she can toggle between cameras for a closer look.

The PV360 camera can be spec’ed for any new Saf-T-Liner C2.  To learn more about this or other BusWise® technologies, please contact your local Thomas Built dealer.