Uber: That Time Ex-CEO Travis Kalanick Said Autonomous Vehicles Were Necessary For the Company's Very Survival

Uber's very existence..
Actually he said it a few different times, in a fewe different ways. Here's one:

"We're at the very beginning stages of becoming a robotics company," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Vanity Fair Summit in San Francisco in October. "As we move toward the future, autonomy is a pretty critical thing for us. It's existential."

-via c|net, Dec. 2016

Existential.
I think he chose his words carefully, an existential threat literally threatens the existence of a firm and he has known since at least 2014 that without major breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles Uber could never be worth what they had convinced investors to pay:

"When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, May 28, 2014

One more, from the Waymo lawsuit:
In its response to court on Friday, Uber said stopping its work on self-driving cars would threaten its future as a "a viable business."

"To hinder Uber's continued progress in its independent development of an in-house lidar that is fundamentally different than Waymo's, when Uber has not used any of Waymo's trade secrets, would impede Uber's efforts to remain a viable business, stifle the talent and ingenuity that are the primary drivers of this emerging industry, and risk delaying the implementation of technology that could prevent car accidents," Uber said (emphasis ours).—via Business Insider, April 8, 2017

That's not someone speaking off the cuff, that's a statement in a U.S. Federal Court.

Here's Izabella Kaminska and Jamie Powell at FT Alphaville on the current state of affairs:

Uber's conflicting self-driving fleet vision

We at Alphaville have for a long time argued the economics of self-driving taxi fleets don't work.

If you're still not convinced, we recommend Uber's IPO docs, which were out Thursday.
First off, a cursory reading of the documents implies the main reason Uber is being propelled into the self-driving race is not necessarily because it thinks it's going to work for them, but because it fears if it doesn't the likes of Google and Tesla will eat their lunch.

From the S-1 (our emphasis):

We have invested, and we expect to continue to invest, substantial amounts in autonomous vehicle technologies. As discussed elsewhere in this prospectus, we believe that autonomous vehicle technologies may have the ability to meaningfully impact the industries in which we compete. While we believe that autonomous vehicles present substantial opportunities, the development of such technology is expensive and time-consuming and may not be successful. Several other companies, including Waymo, Cruise Automation, Tesla, Apple, Zoox, Aptiv, May Mobility, Pronto.ai, Aurora, and Nuro, are also developing autonomous vehicle technologies, either alone or through collaborations with car manufacturers, and we expect that they will use such technology to further compete with us in the personal mobility, meal delivery, or logistics industries. We expect certain competitors to commercialise autonomous vehicle technologies at scale before we do. Waymo has already introduced a commercialised ride-hailing fleet of autonomous vehicles, and it is possible that other of our competitors could introduce autonomous vehicle offerings earlier than we will. In the event that our competitors bring autonomous vehicles to market before we do, or their technology is or is perceived to be superior to ours, they may be able to leverage such technology to compete more effectively with us, which would adversely impact our financial performance and our prospects. For example, use of autonomous vehicles could substantially reduce the cost of providing ride-sharing, meal delivery, or logistics services, which could allow competitors to offer such services at a substantially lower price as compared to the price available to consumers on our platform. If a significant number of consumers choose to use our competitors’ offerings over ours, our financial performance and prospects would be adversely impacted.

And yet, the documents also reveal even Uber can't envisage a world where self driving fleets will ever be able to cater to all demand scenarios, and hence it expects to be reliant on human drivers (and their capital) for a long time yet.

For example (our emphasis):...

...MUCH MORE

At least under current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi we aren't hearing about sleazeball scandals, but the downside is, that means I won't get to link to the story of Project Judas.