It's organizing and connecting people.

It is not high difficulty engineering projects. Their app and website are pretty straightforward stuff.

For a self driving car you need completely different people.

But surely they can get the right people with their capital.

You need the right people to know who the right people are.

Uber is just not well equipped for this. They could do it certainly (throw enough money at it), but their risk/reward is not in the right place.

(But it I mean setup a research team and at least type, I don't expect a self driving car for decades. Maybe a sort of road train that only drives on pre-marked routes would happen first.)