Tricky one. I think there will be initial positivity. We're getting to that stage now. Lawmakers are happy to embrace it at the moment. The first accidents will result in a major setback, though. Difficult to say exactly how much people will freak out when the first casualties happen in a self-driving car. Hopefully by that time there will be enough data to strongly demonstrate that even though self-driving cars can still crash, they can also be much safer than non-autonomous cars.
The European mood is shifting (no pun intended). I see an increasing number of models being offered with automatic gearboxes, even at the lower end of the price scale.
Sales numbers are probably available somewhere, but, for a quick sample, I took a cursory look at a local used car site - out of 5058 cars listed from 2010 onwards, some 716 are automatic. Nearly 15% is pretty good for something that used to be much harder to come by.