I'm guessing it's more of the idea that Japan will tolerate 100 possibly dangerous vehicles to further their engineering goals.
What any sane engineer would do is to keep testing these cars with a safety driver and gather anough information/miles to claim higher statistical safety than a human driver, while keeping track that those miles were really in fact driven without intervention/(or with predictable and managed intervention). Once they would have those numbers, then they would know for sure that the car is safe and they could release/manufacture hundreds of thousands/unlimited number of units to the market. If they didn't - it means either the car really isn't tested or it doesn't do what they claim it does.
Releasing a 100 vechicles just doesn't make sense, unless the claims are somehow shady or misrepresentative.