Sometimes it feels like the state of the autonomous-vehicle industry can only be viewed through the reflection of a fun-house mirror. The setbacks appear as seismic shudders. The progress seen as inch-by-inch developments.
Certainly, the shuttering of Argo last October counts as one of the former. The demise of the Ford-and-Volkswagen-backed company has cast a pall across the industry, one that pervades nearly every corner of the AV realm, from funding to talent acquisition.
Hype was, of course, a problem in the early days of Pollyanna predictions of an imminent self-driving future. But the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme, and it's served to overshadow the incremental progress others have made in Argo's aftermath.
Case in point: Three companies reached noteworthy milestones in the past month.
On Feb. 3, Waymo said its vehicles had surpassed 1 million miles driven without a human driver behind the wheel, even…