It didn't take great vision or foresight to see the uber app back in the early 2010's and see how things will play out vis-a-vis getting rid of the driver - and my money is still with them (literaly) from a brand name perspective only.
The entire Selfdriving/Robotaxi space goes the same way that ASIC miners for bitcoin did - the producers find it most profitable to run it themselves while selling expensive hardware to end users.
It's not clear to me. The Uber we have today seems to be paying the third party drivers around cost price per kilometer, and doesn't have to allocate capital for purchasing vehicles, nor for cleaning or maintaining those vehicles. An Uber that had to buy a bunch of self-driving vehicles that they would also then have to maintain, clean, and service, seems like a worse, more risky, business than what they are running today.
That doesn't make sense, as the drivers are obviously not operating at a loss.
If by "obviously" you only mean "That seems dumb" then, yeah, welcome to planet Earth.