I’m there for my own training—to find out what it’s like to not drive a car while sitting in the driver’s seat. When I heard that Google has a formal program to qualify people to operate cars that, at least aspirationally, don’t need anyone to operate them, I volunteered. Going through the whole program was out of the question — it takes four weeks, full-time, and god knows what liabilities might be involved. But the company decided that with a compressed lesson on the basics, it would be okay for me to putter around at its private testing grounds. As an afterthought, a rep asked me, “Uh, you are a good driver, right?”

Sure!

I was in, and not just for the opportunity to sit in the front seat of Google’s car. In the process, I was rewarded with a very rare look at Google’s SDC industrial complex, a co-evolved infrastructure of hardware, software, drivers, and engineers that the company hopes will contribute to its argument that autonomous systems are the future.

The test-driving program evolved out of the company’s need to log a lot of time driving autonomously. “We had two objectives,” says Chris Urmson, director of the autonomous car program, which is in the process of leaving the Google X research division and becoming a separate Alphabet company. “One was to drive 1,000 miles of interesting roads, and the other was to drive 100,000 miles of roads. At the time, this was 10 times more than anyone had ever driven before with one of these things. We realized we couldn’t just have our developers in the cars all day — we had to get some people to come out and drive them.”

So, in 2009, Google began hiring nonengineers for the project. It figured out the profile of these drivers pretty much on the fly. The first hires were tone setters like Brian Torcellini, then a recent urban studies major at San Diego State, taking some time off after graduation — surfing trips and the like — before facing up to a career. A friend who worked at Google recommended him. His interviewers were vague about what the job entailed. “Basically they were like, ‘Do you like cars? Do you like technology? Do you want to drive pretty much all day, everyday?’” he says. “I said sure, I’m happy to sign up. They led me to believe that I might be working with the Street View team, but I walk in and see self-driving cars being built. And I’m like, okay, this is awesome.”

There were only a few like Torcellini, and the engineers still did the driving. For the first couple weeks, Torcellini recalls, he mostly sorted screws. When he finally got behind the wheel, he drove in circles in the parking lots. Around that time, Urmson and Dmitri Dolgov, who leads the software team, began to informally train the drivers. “We had some quizzes on what the different parts meant and how they worked and what can go wrong with them,” says Urmson. “And then we showed them the techniques we were using for how to hold the steering wheel, how to be ready to react and what to react to. And then we demonstrated it. We then took them out there for a while and had them sit in the left seat and observed them and gave them feedback.”

Eventually, the SDC engineers certified the drivers — no mortar boards or “Pomp and Circumstance,” just an informal acknowledgement — and let the drivers go out on their own. “That was actually a huge day for us, when we transitioned from the engineers to the operations team being the folks taking the cars out,” says Urmson. “It was kind of cool to get to the point where some folks that don’t have PhDs are getting the thing to work every day.”

Torcellini says that not-driving on public roads felt intuitive — after all the hours he spent in the parking lot, he was used to sitting behind the wheel of a car that drove itself. Initially, testing was limited to highway driving. But in early 2014, Google felt it had essentially mastered the elements of highway driving and focused on the knottier problems of street driving.