Hedging is very smart when there’s a huge future market at stake and you (Toyota) makes hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.

Unfortunately, it's not unusual for large corporations to invest millions or even billions into new R&D projects that yield no results.

This is especially true for high technology projects, and only becoming more of a risk as technology becomes more complex.

Can totally see it happening with something like self-driving cars, which is currently still a black art (remember how even Uber apparently needed to filch some IP from Waymo to even get its own project going?)

> remember how even Uber apparently needed to filch some IP from Waymo to even get its own project going?

Any proof? I see a settlement but not an admission or proof of guilt by Uber (not saying the former Google employee wasn't dirty). https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/9/16995254/waymo-uber-lawsui...

To digress a bit, if development and research is becoming more and more expensive, that would seem to imply increasing concentration of wealth is necessary to keep tech progress chugging along. To build pyramids, you have to have pharaohs...

Spreading their bets? Buying into something else with Uber with the "self driving" being a front?

This. Toyota knows our cars may go the way of our CD collections