A ton of companies are working on self-driving cars, including many companies that are:

a. Bigger than Uber.

b. Have actual profitable businesses that they can use to fund their research.

I have never seen any kind of evidence that Uber will either be the first to market with true self-driving cars, or that their self-driving cars will be superior in kind to their competitors. The closest thing to evidence that I've ever seen anyone provide that Uber self-driving cars are going to have any advantages to their many rivals is "this is an existential issue to Uber."

Companies fail all the time. This is pretty strong evidence that "existential problems" are not guaranteed to be solvable ones.