The articles I have read have made it sound like a Catch-22. They cannot profit while they have to pay drivers, but self-driving cars will enable competition from both software companies and automakers, especially if an automaker reduces the need for capital by renting out self-driving cars. It's unclear how Uber will not be further commoditized by self-driving cars.

By beating people to market with self driving cars. That's the reason Uber is pushing it.

Is there any evidence that Uber is even on par with the self-driving technology of Google, Cruise, or Tesla?

There is no evidence of Uber being better or worse than the others, but they are ahead in terms of using self driving cars as taxis.

https://newsroom.uber.com/san-francisco-your-self-driving-ub...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-self...

There's evidence that all the big players have top talent, deep pockets, and are staying abreast of the research, which is humming along. Insomuch as they're committed, there's no good reason to believe any one of them is out of the running, or more than a couple years or so behind the peloton.

Because deploying Robotaxi fleets will be so capital intensive, no single company is likely to dominate the way Uber has in rideshare. There is enough demand spread out across enough different cities that they won't need to compete directly for a long time.

Right, I wasn't suggesting Uber was hopelessly behind the other major players, but that it seems unlikely they'll beat everyone else to market.

If they can't maintain their market share in a driverless car world, it's difficult to imagine how they can justify their current valuation.

What Uber has, that all of the other players don't is a platform, data, and experience operating such a service. All they have to do is add in the self driving cars, whereas all (most) of the other players have to build the whole platform.