Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, it has much fewer casualties than gas, wind or solar. The difference is the risk of nuclear is indiscriminate, whereas people dying in a solar accident are the workers (rooftop fall).
If the driver is in control of their own car, they have themselves to blame (mostly). With self-driving, they are trusting their lives into a single entity they understand nothing about.
The census don’t, generally speaking, tend to believe statistics and facts. And the media will always spin a bad situation to boost their click through rates.
So, even though self driving cars may be 100% less prone to accidents (this is just an example), media headlines like “driver killed instantly when self driving car automatically steered into a wall without warning,” will cause the majority to push back and say they’re unsafe.
Interesting example. A justifiable fear people have of self-driving cars is them crashing in scenarios where no (minimally competent, not ass-blasted drunk) human would reasonably crash, like randomly steering into a wall.
I think if self-driving cars were seen to crash in scenarios where a human could have made a similar mistake, their reputation would be better.
Not to say the media reporting of these incidents would be in any way accurate or fair.
Right now it's around 10%, but it's different for different regions.
We seem to be able to handle people dying one at a time, but once a whole town is in danger, even if this is something that happens once a generation (this is the hard part to understand), it crosses that threshold of "this isn't worth it".
That said, if self driving car deaths get reported as much as traditional car deaths (that is to say, not very often), perhaps people will think they are just as safe as driving themselves.
IIRC those numbers are very, very, low. Your village should worry about the dam upstream, not the nuclear power station upwind.