Self-driving cars never made any sense as part of Uber's business model. What were they going to do, buy a fleet of vehicles, build garages, hire mechanics? They're a software company.
It's not like you drive millions of miles without a small fleet of vehicle. Not only is that what they would do on large scale, it's what they already started to do on small scale.
Uber's a company whose current main product is software, that doesn't mean they can't branch out into new things and are forever tied to software. I'd also argue that Uber already has a lot more experience with working with a million different people than most other companies (currently drivers, in the future possibly mechanics, garage owners, etc).
Maybe they thought they'd franchise out the tech, lease and loan terms the way they do for their cars now? It's a good point, I dont know what they were thinking, if anything aside from "that'll sort itself out when the time comes"
