Billions are being invested in self-driving technology each year, and some question why it isn’t further along today, whether it can be really made to work and whether it can be a business that scales and makes profits for the many companies in the game.

To address these questions, I engaged this week in a formal debate. Taking the negative was Professor Raj Rajkumar from CMU. Raj was one of the team leaders when CMU won the DARPA Urban Challenge — the contest that really got the self-driving robocar world going.

For those who prefer, here is a transcript of my opening statement. For the rest you will need to go to the debate. In addition to the opening and rebuttals, there are 3 sub sections on:

Is Tesla’s approach viable at all?
What are the prospects for self-driving consumer vehicles?
What are the prospects for commercial services.