Argo AI's headquarters, in a historic industrial district along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, is so new that its lobby and elevators are redolent of freshly applied paint.

Argo is one of the newer players in the burgeoning autonomous drive technology space, having come out of stealth mode less than two years ago with a billion-dollar investment from Ford. Now, with the goal of deploying a fully autonomous Ford vehicle in Miami in 2021 bearing down fast, Argo is ready to show off what its test vehicles are capable of.

"This is not demoware," Argo CEO Bryan Salesky warns before the company's Ford Fusion arrives for its first on-the-record media ride. "This car runs the latest build of the software we are currently testing."

The ride will take place on the narrow, potholed streets of the Strip District, where Argo's headquarters are located, rather than some quiet, well-marked suburban boulevard. To emphasize that Argo isn't playing it safe or performing self-driving theater, Salesky gives a warning that I've never heard in advance of an autonomous car ride: "You will probably get a few disengagements on your ride." In other words, chances are good that our car will encounter at least one situation that it's not prepared to handle, forcing the safety driver behind the wheel to take over.

As soon as we're on the road, it becomes clear where Salesky's warning is coming from. The Strip District was developed in the early 19th century as an industrial area to process raw materials. Trucks and vans parked on the curbs make the already-tight roadways even narrower, hiding pedestrians until they dart out and forcing vehicles to wait as yet more large vehicles squeeze through chokepoints.

These are tough conditions for even the best autonomous drive systems. During a 2017 demonstration, Cruise Automation's autonomous cars struggled to cope with large vehicles stopped at the side of the road -- a bus in one case and a taco truck in another -- forcing safety drivers to take over and drive around them.

Considering that Cruise was founded three years before Argo and has had self-driving vehicles testing on public roads for about a year longer, it wouldn't be surprising if Argo were still struggling with the challenges Cruise faced a year ago. But there was no sign that this was the case, at least in terms of this specific issue, as Argo's system drove confidently around protruding parked trucks and through several chokepoints where there was only room for one vehicle to drive through at a time.

Nor did the Argo system drive tentatively or feel overly cautious, the way other autonomous vehicles have in years past. Trained in the assertive Pittsburgh driving culture, the car accelerated in a surprisingly confident manner, executed crisp turns and drove remarkably close to parked cars, rather than hogging the center of the street. When faced with an oncoming car nudging toward the center of the narrow road to avoid parked trucks, it slowed with plenty of room and became suddenly cautious until the obstacle passed.

In spite of Salesky's warning and the safety driver's intense readiness, the Argo car I rode in didn't experience a single disengagement. Its ability to cope was impressive. But many more challenges lie ahead for the car before it's ready for its 2021 deployment in Miami: This car's hardware is what Argo calls version zero, and a version 1 with closer-to-production parts is already in the works. Testing in Washington, D.C., will teach the vehicle to cope with complex new intersections and unique phenomena like motorcades, while ongoing testing in Miami continues to build the software's confidence in unique local conditions, such as sudden, intense rain showers and traffic featuring fast-moving, lane-splitting mopeds.

Salesky isn't letting the car's impressive progress blind his team to the fiendish corner cases they have yet to solve, or possibly even see.

Launching in "2021 is a goal, but I always say that it's ultimately a safety thing," he says. "So if we don't believe it's ready, we're not launching in 2021. That just is what it is."

-- Edward Niedermeyer