“To them, it doesn’t really matter who ultimately succeeds,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving-vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm. “If you’ve got a car that works and can drive safely, you’re welcome to come onto Uber and provide rides.”

Still, it’s too early to say whether the Kleenex gambit will work.

Plenty has changed since 2015. Kalanick is no longer at Uber, deposed by a hostile board in 2017. The company marked a grim milestone in 2018 when one of its own testing self-driving vehicles struck and killed a woman. The incident, for which federal investigators later found the ride-hail giant partially responsible, led to a suspension and then reorganization of Uber’s self-driving development effort.

In 2020, Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle unit to a competitor. In some ways, though, this asset-light existence—where Uber serves as the middleman for drivers and riders, without owning its own (robo)car—seems to have worked for the company. Under the guidance of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company finally recorded its first profit last year.

One potential issue for Uber is that its particular role in the autonomous vehicle industry won’t be super useful for a while. Uber is powerful because it’s already on the phones of some 160 million active monthly users all over the world. The company is good at matching people driving cars with those millions of people who want rides. But there likely won’t be millions of robotaxis for a while.

Waymo, the US leader in robotaxis, has about 1,500 vehicles operating in five cities. Baidu says its next city, Dubai, wil...