In early 2009, the Google Self-Driving Car Project was born, evolving over the years into what we now know as Waymo. Not long after the project started, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page challenged engineers to drive autonomously without human intervention or disengagements along ten challenging 100-mile routes in Google's home state of California. Yes, that was long before state governments started granting licenses for driverless car testing on public roads. The first state to issue such a license was Nevada in May 2012, with California doing the same only in September 2014. So how did Google get away with testing fully-autonomous cars on public roads in California in 2009?