One of the most common questions I get from friends and relatives is, “How soon will we get self-driving cars?”

And my answer is that it’s a question of where, not when. Uber already has tightly-geofenced autonomous vehicle trials in Pittsburgh, and nuTonomy and Delphi both have limited trials in Singapore. nuTonomy has announced more trials in Boston. Uber came to San Francisco and then left within a week, due to a dispute with the California DMV.

Over the next year, we’ll see these types of public trials roll out to even more cities.

Elon Musk, though, said something last night that might blow all of that out of the water.

That’s all I’ve got, and maybe Musk is over-promising. But it sounds pretty exciting.

California Is Sunsetting Botts’ Dots: Standardizing lane markings helps self-driving cars. If you don’t know what Botts’ Dots are, click through to learn a little bit about transportation history!

Nissan and Volvo to Test Self-Driving Cars in London This Year: It’s unclear whether these particular programs will be open to the public, but we will see more of these single-city tests this year.

Self-Driving Cars Will Bring Jobs to Disabled People: Disabled people have been staunch advocates of self-driving cars, for obvious reasons, but I never really thought through the economics of this. One estimate is that 2 million disabled Americans will become employable simply by being able to get to work.

Sean Everett makes a strident case that Amazon is developing it’s own self-driving vehicles.

I’ve heard rumors about this for a while, including from startups that wouldn’t mind one day being acquired by Amazon.

And it makes all the sense in the world.

But I’m not sure I believe it.

The main reason it’s such an open secret that Apple is working on self-driving cars is that self-driving car experts keep joining Apple to work on some secret project.

I haven’t heard anything like that about Amazon.

So if prominent autonomous vehicle engineers aren’t building Amazon’s self-driving vehicle program, then who is?

Porter’s Five Forces is one of the classic frameworks that business schools teach for evaluating the attractiveness of a business or industry.. Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, invented it.

The framework is, at its core, a five-item checklist:

1. Barriers to Entry
2. Substitution
3. Supplier Power
4. Customer Power
5. Existing Competition

I’m re-wording Porter’s original definitions to the phrases I think of when I step through the checklist, but that’s the gist of it.

I thought of this checklist during a recent conversation about strategy for Waymo (Google’s Self-Driving Car division).

One school of thought is that Google should position itself as the supplier of software to the automotive industry. That’s a position that’s worked well for Android, and it plays to Google’s strengths as a software company.

An alternative school of thought is that Google should build out its own transportation-as-a-service business, because car manufacturers are too smart to get trapped with Google’s software. They’ve seen how that played out for the mobile handset manufacturers, and they don’t want to get “Samsungized”.

Rather than choose between these two approaches, I want to focus here on the narrow question of whether the car manufacturers are “too smart” to get trapped with Google’s software.

The people I worked with at Ford are very smart, and I imagine the same is true at Toyota and GM and most other manufacturers.

But this is where Porter’s five forces comes in.

As a automotive software vendor, Google is in an industry with low “customer power”. There are a lot of different car manufacturers.

Some of those manufacturers are going to be way behind the curve in terms of developing autonomous vehicle software. And those manufacturers will, rationally, decide that their best bet for catching up with the pack is to partner with Waymo.

So regardless of how smart the car manufacturers are, there will be manufacturers out there who will be interested in using Waymo’s software.

This year was the first CES appearance for Waymo, although it has appeared in previous years under the name, “Google Self-Driving Car Program”.

Waymo CEO John Krafcik used the opportunity to shed some light on a perpetual parlor game for self-driving car enthusiasts: “what is Google’s strategy for self-driving cars?”

Google has had self-driving cars scooting around Mountain View for years, but it’s always been unclear what the go-to-market strategy would be, and when it would start rolling.

Krafcik’s statements indicate that Google’s long game may be as a provider of autonomous vehicle hardware and software, rather than as an auto manufacturer or a transportation-as-a-service provider.

Krafcik specifically highlighted Waymo’s gains with its in-house LIDAR sensor technology. Along with adding short- and long-range sensing units for better detection than its previous systems, the company has managed to slash the cost of its LIDAR by more than 90 percent in two years from about $75,000 per vehicle.

…

Krafcik’s language is telling — those “firsts” imply that this is just the start of Waymo’s autonomous partnerships, with many more to come. By focusing on the production of its own hardware along with software, Waymo won’t become a major automaker, at least not yet. Instead, it clearly intends to be the go-to supplier of autonomous driving systems for automakers that don’t want the expense of developing their own.

I’m not convinced the mystery has been solved yet, but it’s an important clue in the Google guessing game.

Nissan is considering building out its self-driving cars in conjunction with call centers staffed by representatives who can help the self-driving cars get out of sticky situations.

According to Wired, Nissan calls this system “teleoperation” and views it as unavoidable, at least in the short term. Weird things happen on the road and the car won’t be able to figure it all out on its own. If the car also doesn’t have a steering wheel, that leaves tele-drivers as the next best option.

On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Wired draws an analogy to an elevator, which almost always has an emergency call button that presumably (I’ve never tried) dials somebody who can help.

The rub seems to come down to whether these call centers are staffed by representatives who only step in at critical junctures, or whether the vehicles are really “teleoperated”.

The latter doesn’t seem safe (latency being a big problem) and doesn’t seem like a big improvement over normal human driving, but it’s an interesting minimum viable product.

Frank Chen is a Partner at Andreesen Horowitz who publishes terrific summaries of exciting area of technology.

A while back we talked on the phone about a self-driving car presentation he was thinking of putting together.

He put it together and it’s a terrific discussion of 16 Questions About Self-Driving Cars.

1. Straight the Level 5 or not?
2. LIDAR or not?
3. Pre-computed HD maps, or build on the fly?
4. What blend of computation techniques?
5. How much real world vs. virtual world testing?
6. Will V2X radios play an important role?
7. Can we get rid of traffic lights and four way stops?
8. How will automakers “localize” their cars?
9. How will accident rates trend?
10. When will it become illegal to drive?
11. How will insurance change?
12. Who will win? Silicon Valley vs. China vs. Incumbents
13. Will we buy cars or transportation as a service?
14. How will commute times change?
15. How will cities change?
16. When will this start, and then how quickly will we change to autonomous cars?

Watch the whole presentation!