TBH this does sound exactly like something you'd expect to happen if you took some Javascript ninja used to moving fast and breaking things and asked them to build a car. But surely Uber has more sense than that...
Because that kind of safety-conscious culture needs to be deliberately enforced, from the top all the way down, by a system that takes a long view.
If we're making an analogy to the defense industry, then building self-driving cars as a tech startup is closer to the Anarchist's Cookbook than Northrop Grumman.