Getting the best results

CarGo is only as good as the pictures your camera gives it. Most support questions come down to one of the items below.

Camera placement Ring settings Lighting Speed Teaching it Multiple vehicles What to expect Troubleshooting

Camera placement — closer wins

Closer is better, by a lot. CarGo recognizes a vehicle from the pixels it can see. A car that fills a third of the frame is easy; a car the size of a thumbnail on a distant road is guesswork, and CarGo won't alert on guesses.
Aim the camera so vehicles pass side-on or three-quarter to it — that is where a car's shape, trim and color read best. Straight head-on or tail-on views are the hardest.
Mount it so the road or driveway is in the middle of the frame, not the bottom edge, and away from bushes, pillars or a parked car that could hide part of the vehicle.
If your camera also watches a busy street far away, expect that street to produce "not mine" cards. Vote them ✗ a few times and they go quiet.

Ring settings that silently block vehicles

People Only Mode must be OFF. In the Ring app, open the camera → Motion Settings → Smart Alerts / People Only Mode. When it is on, Ring never records a car driving past, so CarGo never sees one and you get nothing. This is the number-one cause of "no alerts at all."

Video quality: highest available. Camera → Device Settings → Video Settings. If Ring drops your camera to low resolution (it does this on weak Wi-Fi), CarGo warns you once a day — fix the Wi-Fi or move the router.
Motion zones must cover the road or driveway where cars actually pass, not just your porch.
Motion frequency: "Frequently." The battery-saving settings skip events, and a skipped event is a missed car.
A Ring Protect plan is required — without it Ring keeps no clips for CarGo to look at.

Lighting and resolution

Daylight is best. At dusk and dawn cars turn into dark shapes; at night infrared sees shape but not color, so recognition falls off. Expect fewer, less certain alerts after dark — a driveway light helps more than any setting.
Higher-resolution cameras give CarGo more pixels per car. The same car 30 feet away is roughly four times easier for a 2K camera than a 720p one.
Rain on the lens, spiderwebs and glare all cost pixels. A quick wipe is a real fix.

Does speed matter?

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. Slow, close passes (a car pulling into a drive) are the easiest case; a fast pass on a distant road in low light is the hardest, because motion blur eats exactly the detail CarGo needs. Rule of thumb: if you can tell whose car it is from the Ring clip yourself, CarGo can learn to.

Teaching it — the first week

Vote ✓ Mine or ✗ Not mine on the first 10–20 cards. Every vote makes the next decision better; most of the improvement happens in the first couple of days.
Vote on both arriving and leaving. A car leaving shows its back and is farther from the camera — it looks different enough that CarGo needs examples of each.
Open the "Near misses" group now and then. Those are cars CarGo almost alerted on; a ✓ there teaches it a new angle, a ✗ confirms 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.

More than one vehicle

Add each vehicle in the app under My vehicles with a name and its make and model. When you vote ✓ on a card, pick which vehicle it is; CarGo keeps a separate memory for each and lets you choose, per vehicle, whether to be alerted on arriving, leaving, both, or neither.

What to expect

Departures are harder than arrivals (farther, tail-on). If leaving alerts matter most to you, camera placement is the lever.
The first days are noisier. That is the point of the ✓/✗ — it is not a bug, it is the learning happening.
CarGo is a convenience, not a security system. It will occasionally miss or mis-call; treat alerts as "worth a look," never as proof.

Troubleshooting

No alerts at all: People Only Mode (above) → Ring Protect plan → is the camera online and recording clips in the Ring app?
Too many alerts: vote ✗; use Hide from the ⋯ menu to declutter; move the camera or motion zone off the distant street.
Notifications stopped: open the app — if it says "Notifications are off on this device," tap Enable. Android: open cargohold.io in Chrome itself (not inside another app) and make sure Chrome's own notifications are allowed. iPhone: the app must be added to the Home Screen and opened from there.
A card is wrong or shouldn't exist: ⋯ menu → Report a problem (we see it), or Delete (removed from your account and from training).
Anything else: support@cargohold.io.