CarGo can only be as good as the pictures your camera gives it. Most of the questions we receive come down to one of the topics below, and most of them have a simple fix.
CarGo recognizes a vehicle from the pixels it can actually see, so distance matters more than anything else. A car that fills a third of the frame is easy to recognize. A car the size of a thumbnail on a distant road is guesswork, and CarGo does not alert on guesses.
Aim the camera so that vehicles pass it side-on or at a three-quarter angle. Those are the views in which a car's shape, trim, and color read best, while straight head-on and tail-on views are the hardest. Mount the camera so that the road or driveway sits in the middle of the frame rather than along the bottom edge, and keep it clear of bushes, pillars, and parked cars that could hide part of a passing vehicle.
If your camera also sees a busy street in the distance, that street will produce some "not mine" cards at first. Voting ✗ on a few of them is enough to quiet it down.
In the current Ring app, open the main dashboard, tap the menu (☰), tap Devices, tap your camera, then tap Motion Settings and Smart Alerts. Make sure that recording is enabled for Vehicle as well as for Person. Older versions of the app called the people-only setting "People Only Mode"; it has the same effect and it must be off. Smart Alerts require a Ring subscription, and so does CarGo, because without a subscription Ring keeps no clips for CarGo to look at.
Three more settings are worth a look. Motion Zones (under Motion Settings) must cover the road or driveway where cars actually pass, not only your porch. Motion Frequency exists only on battery-powered cameras (Device Settings → Motion Settings → Motion Frequency); the battery-saving choices pause the camera after each event, and a paused camera is a missed car, so choose the most frequent option. Video Settings (Device Settings → Video Settings) should be at the highest resolution your camera offers. If Ring lowers your camera's resolution on weak Wi-Fi, CarGo will warn you once a day; the fix is better Wi-Fi at the camera, not a CarGo setting.
Ring changes its app regularly and menu names can differ between camera generations. If a path above does not match what you see, the setting is usually one level away under the camera's Device Settings; if you cannot find it, email us a screenshot and we will update this page.
Daylight gives the best results. At dusk and dawn, cars become dark shapes, and at night the camera's infrared sees shape but not color, so recognition falls off after dark. You should expect fewer and less certain alerts at night; a driveway light helps more than any software setting.
A higher-resolution camera gives CarGo more pixels per car. The same car thirty feet away is roughly four times easier for a 2K camera than for a 720p one. Rain on the lens, spider webs, and glare all cost pixels, so a quick wipe of the lens is a real fix.
There is no hard cutoff. Ring records at a modest frame rate, so a car only needs to be sharp in a couple of frames. A slow, close pass, such as a car pulling into a driveway, is the easiest case. A fast pass on a distant road in low light is the hardest, because motion blur removes exactly the detail CarGo needs. As a rule of thumb, if you can tell whose car it is from the Ring clip yourself, CarGo can learn to tell as well.
Vote ✓ Mine or ✗ Not mine on the first ten to twenty cards. Every vote improves the next decision, and most of the improvement happens in the first couple of days. Please vote on both arriving and leaving cards: a car leaving shows its back and is farther from the camera, so it looks different enough that CarGo needs examples of each.
Open the "Near misses" group now and then. Those are cars that CarGo almost alerted on; a ✓ there teaches it a new angle, and a ✗ confirms that it was right to hold back. Voting ✗ on a neighbor's car three or four times is enough. You are not expected to grade the whole street.
Add each vehicle in the app under CarGo Hold with a name and its make and model. When you add one, CarGo looks through your recent clips and shows you the vehicles it found so that you can point at yours; that first pick gives the new vehicle its memory. After that, when you vote ✓ on a card, you choose which vehicle it is. CarGo keeps a separate memory for each vehicle and lets you decide, per vehicle, whether you want to be alerted on arriving, leaving, both, or neither.
Departures are harder than arrivals, because a departing car is farther away and tail-on. If leaving alerts matter most to you, camera placement is the lever to pull. The first days are noisier than the weeks that follow; that is the learning happening, not a fault. CarGo is a convenience, not a security system. It will occasionally miss a car or call the wrong one, so treat an alert as something worth a look rather than as proof.
No alerts at all. Check the Smart Alerts recording setting described above, confirm that your Ring subscription is active, and confirm in the Ring app that the camera is online and recording clips.
Too many alerts. Vote ✗ on the cards that are wrong, use Hide from the ⋯ menu to clear the list, and consider moving the camera or its motion zone away from the distant street.
Notifications have stopped. Open the app. If it says that notifications are off on this device, tap Enable. On Android, open cargohold.io in Chrome itself rather than inside another app, and make sure that Chrome is allowed to send notifications. On iPhone, the app must be added to the Home Screen and opened from there.
A card is wrong or should not exist. Use the ⋯ menu on the card. Report a problem tells us about it, and Delete removes the card from your account and from CarGo's training.
For anything else, write to [email protected].
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