They already have Toyota Research Institute, which they've invested 1 billion and got the Gill Pratt to head so I not sure why they want to team up with Uber now.
Unfortunately, it's not unusual for large corporations to invest millions or even billions into new R&D projects that yield no results.
This is especially true for high technology projects, and only becoming more of a risk as technology becomes more complex.
Can totally see it happening with something like self-driving cars, which is currently still a black art (remember how even Uber apparently needed to filch some IP from Waymo to even get its own project going?)
To digress a bit, if development and research is becoming more and more expensive, that would seem to imply increasing concentration of wealth is necessary to keep tech progress chugging along. To build pyramids, you have to have pharaohs...
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