>> Uber first made its interest in self-driving cars public when it hired about 40 researchers and scientists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015.
It doesn't sound like "they don't really have the expertise" (per your comment).
Perhaps autonomous driving is even harder than press releases from other, more cautious companies, have led us to believe?
Admitting the tech is a ways out means either 1.) Admitting that they have no idea how they're going to make money or 2.) Admitting that they're going to have to significantly raise prices to both improve per-mile profitability and cover the inevitable associated volume dropoff.
The only real explanation I have for why Uber hasn't accepted the inevitable and jacked up rates is that so many people are feeding at the trough no one wants to be the one to admit that the emperor has no clothes and there's no magic fix for making money at the current rate structure.
The first is that self-driving is super difficult, they don't really have the expertise, and a lot of their progress seems to have come from being able disregard proper safety procedures. So to move forward with it they'd need to fess up to investors that it'll take much longer than anticipated and it'll be much more expensive. That'll damage the company value significantly, and it's not really relevant to what the core of the business is doing right now. I actually find it fascinating - Uber has built an app that disrupts the traditional taxi marketplace. Separate to that they've got a division working on a produce to disrupt Uber's current market place.
The second problem is that if they choose not to do autonomous driving their entire business proposition needs re-establishing. Can they actually make money doing what they're currently doing? Or are they doomed to sink huge venture capital sums into acquiring market shares, only to fail to reach a dominant enough position to actually raise prices and make bank. And part two to that question: Can they achieve that profitability and a good enough return to be worthwhile for investors before someone who does succeed in disrupting the taxi business with self-driving cars.