SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area have shown a less enthusiastic approach to embracing self-driving cars since a few fatal accidents involving driverless vehicles early this year, a poll said on Thursday.
The 2018 poll, conducted by the Bay Area Council, a regional, CEO-led business and economic policy association in San Francisco in the U.S. west state of California, found 46 percent of the surveyed willing to relinquish control of the steering wheel, down from 52 percent in 2017.
Thirty-nine percent of the respondents surveyed by the poll between March 20 and April 3 said they wouldn' t get into a car without a real, live driver.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters in the nine-county Bay Area found 65 percent of them remain unconvinced about the traffic-busting ability of self-driving cars to resolve the notorious problem of time-sucking traffic jam in the Bay Area.
The growing skepticism among Bay Area drivers became more evident after a few high-profile accidents involving driverless cars several months ago.
In March, a 49-year-old female pedestrian was struck and killed by one of Uber's autonomous vehicles on a street in Tempe, Arizona. That car had a driving assistant in its front passenger seat at the time of the fatal collision.
The deadly crash later forced the company to suspend indefinitely self-driving operations in the state.
In another accident, a California man was killed on a highway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, in the same month when his Tesla Model X SUV car crashed into a highway barrier.
The vehicle was operating in its Autopilot mode, including some driverless features such as the ability for the car to change lanes and park on its own.
The Bay Area Council said in the poll that self-driving car still remains one of those early-stage technologies, and it will be awhile longer before self-driving cars outnumber human drivers on the road.
While 31 percent say self-driving cars will be the majority plying the roads within the next 10 years, 45 percent agree that self-driving cars won' t rule the roads for 11 to 50 years or more, according to the poll.
