It happened again. Another eighth-generation Chevrolet Corvette fell off a lift at a dealership. Previously reported by Carscoops, video footage of the incident was uploaded to YouTube by user Jason Grubb, and it’s pretty hard to watch. Not only does the rear of the vehicle come crashing into the shop floor, the right rear lift arm tears through the composite coachwork like a Kurosawa film. This isn’t the first time a C8 Corvette has fallen off a lift, and I doubt it will be the last either.
Every car has specific lifting points, areas from which a car is designed to be raised. BMW likes to used plastic or rubber pads, most body-on-frame trucks have lifting points located on their frames, and some automakers are particularly stingy when it comes to lifting areas. However, lifting points take into account a vehicle’s front-to-rear weight balance, structural strength, and underbody surface orientation with the goal of the safest possible lifting experience. Most C8 Corvettes have around 40 percent of their weight over their front axles and 60 percent of their weight over their rear axles, meaning the car should be positioned further forward on a lift than most front-engined cars.
According to the owner’s manual, the C8 Corvette’s rear lift points are just in front of the rear arches, behind the extreme rear edges of the side vents. Just by watching the footage of this latest fall incident, it seems obvious that the rear lift arms aren’t in that position, but instead farther forward on the car. Proper lifting procedure may have prevented this incident from ever occurring.
Weirdly, this isn’t the first time GM technicians have allegedly had difficulties raising mid-engined cars. The Pontiac Fiero used rigid cooling pipes that ran along the sills, since the engine was behind the driver and the central tunnel was filled up with fuel tank. If the car was lifted from the wrong spots, lift arms or jacks could crush the cooling pipes, starving the engine of coolant.
With a little more care and attention, this latest Corvette lift incident may have been prevented. I love the access and convenience of two-post lifts, but raising more than a ton of vehicle is serious business. It’s all too easy to damage a vehicle or cause harm to human life in a moment of carelessness, so proper checks go a long way. If you’ve never used a two-post lift before, here’s what to do: Locate and use the manufacturer-approved lift points, raise the vehicle just barely off the ground, and rock it to ensure it’s not going anywhere. If it’s staying steady on the lift arms, continue to raise the vehicle until it’s above the nearest lock to your preferred working position, then bleed pressure in the hydraulic system until the lift is sitting firmly on the locks. Working on cars is fun, but it’s important to be safe so you can continue to wrench in the future.
(Photo credits: Jason Grubb/YouTube, Chevrolet, Pontiac)
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I’ve never used a lift so can someone enlighten me: on a car as low as a C8, how do you even initally see the proper lift points when positioning the arms? Maybe it’s not quite as low as I’m thinking, and you can lay down and see them still.
I’m sure you’re looking for some technical, physical, or engineering answer here. But the reason C8 Corvettes are falling off lifts is almost certainly ego and machismo.
“I don’t have to read the instructions. I know how to do it.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I’ve been liftin’ Vettes for 15 years bud. I think I know how to do it.”
But I do know how to do it
Double check anyway.
Some cars are, indeed, a pain in the butt to get on the lift correctly. The underside of my Alfa is a tale of woe from improper lifting (so many dents) and when I had my S-Type any time I’d bring it somewhere I’d leave a printout of the lifting points because they were bonkers unintuitive and the FSM warned of grave damage if you used the wrong points. Also, fun fact, the Land Rover Discovery II is on the list of cars Costco won’t put on their lifts at all! I’m told it is because the frame/liftpoints are so far inboard they’ve had issues, which I get.
Anyway, all that goes out the window when you’re taking your new(ish) car to the actual dealership. Mistakes happen, for sure, but come on…
Having never used a lift like this, how do these things not have some kind of built-in sensors for center-of-gravity? Seems like an easy safety feature. When the vehicle is lifted a few inches, the weight of the vehicle at each pad is measured. If the weight is too far off center left-to-right or front-to-back to safely lift the vehicle, the jack would either sound a warning, or would not allow the vehicle to be lifted. I mean, human beings have to stand under these vehicles. Safely lifting the car shouldn’t rely on “lift it a few inches then rock it back and forth to see if it moves…”
That’s probably not too difficult to incorporate, considering how affordable electronic load cells are. It’d be nothing to have them built into the lifting pads themselves, and the gadget to read their outputs and say, oops, looks like there’s no weight at one end of the lift or other, need be no more sophisticated than a cheap Arduino or similar.
I own a lift, and my standard procedure is to lift it a few inches off the ground and then push pull, lift up, push down, basically anything I can to make sure it’s solid. I’ve been surprised a couple times, usually by trying to lift a car with no engine or a truck with a something in the bed that was heavier than I thought, but I’ve never dropped one.
Even if I had electronic measurement using load cells, I would still end up rocking it around before picking it up. Its pretty obvious a few inches off the ground if something isn’t balanced well. The only vehicle I own that scares me on my 2 post lift is a lifted Bronco II. The frame is so short between lifting points that it just doesn’t feel all too stable.
makes sense. they weren’t very stable when driving also. they liked to do unitentional 360’s on the freeway.
That wouldn’t address this failure though. The point at which the lift was holding the car wasn’t structurally ridged enough to support even the correct weight bias. It looks to me like the lift point punched through the material, now you might say “yeah and if the weight was biased correctly it wouldn’t have fallen” to which I would reply, once that material failed, the bias was off either way. That shift would have unloaded the left side of the car, increasing he load on the failing right side, and it still would have fallen.
Lifts are dirt cheap and basically oversized jacks.
You could easily double the cost of a lift with such a system. And double it again with the cost of downtime when it malfunctions.
The only thing you need to do to be safe lifting a car with a two post lift is to pay attention. And there are at least 19 other ways a lift can kill you without the load being unbalanced. So you have to pay attention regardless of whether there are load sensors.
(Oh, also, it’s pretty typical for the balance to change while the car is already up in the air. All you have to do is remove some heavy part – which is frequently why you lifted the car up in the first place! Have to pay attention!)
Jeez, I lifted more than a few Fieros back in the day, and never took the cooling pipes into account. We had the old hydraulic center post lifts, and the MO was always to lift on the stuff that was most solid (basically subframe). As I recall, Fieros had some of this up front, and a good chunk of it in the back (the familar Citation front end albeit reversed, I believe). We would lift on the chassis lip only in rare circumstances – I hated lifting that way because the lift chocks were narrow and most lips weren’t exactly robust (especially on Japanese cars). Seeing creases in those things from other guys was common, and I never wanted to do that to a customer car.
Agree, as a Fiero owner I have always thought it odd that people had issues with lifting them. The frame is huge and very easy to use to lift the car. At the same time about half the Fieros I have scavenged from in junk yards have at least one pipe crushed.
I sent my old CJ7 to the junkyard after Pep Boys called me to tell me they couldn’t get it on the lift without it threatening to break in half.
Turns out, I’m pretty sure they were putting the lift arms under the rocker panels for the body tub rather than under the frame.
Well, it IS Pep Boys.
In the same vein as how there should be more communication between the manufacturers of bread, and the manufacturers of toasters, hmmmm?
lifts are serious business. The worst are air-cooled Porsches. The ass is so heavy. Never lost one (probably cause I’m not an idiot) but the angle some of those things would sit at, you’d think they were just gonna backflip off the bendpak.
I nearly dropped one. Had one come into the shop I was working at part time, 90s model. Owner had a pair of ancient 2 post lifts, and the guy coming in had ordered the cheapest tires that would fit his car. Put it on, go to lift it and the nose visibly goes light. Like barely touching the front pads light. I go “Nope!” Put it back down and move the arms back as far as they’ll go on the rear subframe. Boss sees me do this, comes over and simply says “rear engine, good catch”.
How did I get my MGB for nearly free? The day after I bought it, I took it to a tire shop to replace the 10 year old tires. I explained to the tech that it needed to be lifted by the engine crossmember and differential and that the sides are not proper lifting points on this car. After listening to me, I walked to the waiting room and they lifted the car by the sides. Even worse, the back was lifted where it was just a sheet metal wheel arch, with no structure. As you can imagine, there was damage to the side sills. The tire shop’s insurance ended up writing me a check for about $400 less than I had bought the car for. I’ve been just driving it as is for over 3 years now. Maybe someday I’ll fix it, but with late 70’s MGB, I’d just be better off buying a nicer one.
So yeah, pay attention to those lifting points and be insistent that they be used. You can bet when I got new tires on my camper, I was out there being a pain and showing the tech the lifting points since you can damage the axle if you lift a torsion axle from under the axle. I tipped him well after and said thank you very much for listing to me. He was actually thankful for the education on how to lift my camper.
I put stickers on the frame of my travel trailer that say “jack frame under here” with big arrows.
Read the manual? This is a GM dealership service department. There’s no time in the book rate to actually figure out how to do things right. Just tighten everything good like ya always do, and it’ll be good enough.
Why yes, a dealership DID screw up the kind of weird alignment process on my SS Sedan. Why do you ask?
I dont understand why automakers don’t make the lift points blatantly obvious. Make them a different color, highlighter green or orange whatever, a big “LIFT POINT HERE.”
On most of the VW’s I’ve worked on, there’s a arrows molded into the bottom of the side skirt. It’s pretty subtle, but once you know to look for it…
The lifting points shown in the owner’s manual are for two point lifts, either from the front or the rear when using jacks on the ground. When lifting there, the COG doesn’t come in to play the same way it does when lifting from 4 points using a 2 post (or single post) lift. That is why they are labelled as lifting from the front or from the rear.
Pssst! Hey buddy, help me out here. I’m underwater on my 10-year car loan. There’s 100 bucks in it for you if you “accidentally” drop this thing off the lift.
You’d have to give me at least 1 months car payment to drop it.
Maybe I’m watching the joke fly over my head, but if you’re underwater on a car the last thing you want is for it to get totalled because there’s no way insurance is giving you more than it’s worth, so now you’re left with no car and whatever is left of the bad loan.
Gap insurance?
Funniest thing I’ve seen was a coworker who was in the car while bleeding brakes, opened the door and attemped to get out as you would on the ground – except he was 5 feet in the air. Uninjured, but sore.
I’ve done similar. Driver was sayng, “Be careful..” but I was already face down in the parking lot. I expected running boards but their were none.
It looks to me that the rearmost arm was just barely on the rear lift point, and when it slipped off there was nothing at all of any substance behind the bodywork. Yeesh!
This was always my nightmare when I put my ’02 Suburban up on 2 post lifts. Even as far forward as you could pull it, it was obviously ass-heavy on the lift. It gave me the willies. Fortunately it never came close to falling off, but I was also always careful not to hang on a wrench or pry bar aft of the lift posts.
In those cases, lift jack stands are a must, under the front and rear. Not foolproof, but another layer of Swiss cheese improves the odds.
I believe I have the exact same rotary 12,000lb asymmetric 2 post lift and the arms going to the front of the vehicle are a lot shorter than the ones going to the rear of the car. I wonder if you would need to back a mid engine car in to use it… never had that problem…
(BTW, If someone’s interested in buying that lift, I used it for 3 years for lemons cars, had to move out of that shop at the beginning of covid and it’s been stored in the Wrigleyville area of Chicago since, if someone wants to buy it. Minimum ceiling height of 11’4″ so I don’t have a place to install it.)
How much?
$4000, but you can talk me down to $3000 is what I’ve told one person I know from lemons when I mentioned thinking of selling it…
I might be building another garage next summer. If you haven’t sold it by then I’ll give you the $3k for sure.
I’m within 3 hours of you, but my garage tops out at 10′. Instead I’ll pose a question: Have you used a scissor lift, and did you find it a gimmick or legitimately useful? They keep coming back up for me, as they’d allow me to retain both usable parking spaces in my garage.
Not a scissor lift, but I have used the quick jacks. I found them both convenient and very inconvenient at the same time. They’re heavy to drag to the car, and you lose all access from the side of the car where you’d usually be working from, but they are sooo easy to use for quick things like an oil change if you have a dedicated spot in your garage to hang them near to where you’ll use them and don’t need to drag the pump around.
That’s the same drawback I’m worried about with a scissor. I’m not certain either will be useful for anything but brake jobs. I do like the idea of building the floor up with wood until it’s flush and leaving it there, but it might still be too much of an obstacle, since it should be in the middle.
I installed a similar lift in a 10 ft high ceiling building and ran the posts up through the drywall and the connecting hardware is in the attic. I’m short so the attainable height for me is more than adequate. In my 70s, the lift is “keeping me in the game” car repair-wise. Don’t think I could do it crawling around underneath.
Looked into something similar… one of the guys I race with has a 6 car detached garage I wanted to install it in, but the roof starts at 10’6, and for some reason that guy seems overly attached to it.
I have a 10′ garage as well. It is big, well insulated and heated. the ONLY problem is that the ceiling is too low for a lift. Maybe one day I will vault a section of ceiling and live the dream of having a lift.
I’m a small used car dealer with a small shop and have had a couple scissor lifts. Perfect for detailing, brakes, struts and other small jobs. The negatives are oil changes on some cars can be difficult depending on engine setback, any work in the middle of the car is pretty impossible because the entirety of the lift is there, and finding good lift points on some cars. I would definitely recommend them.
The weight distribution of my 911 requires me to use my quickjacks “backwards” when I lift it. it has a tendency to rock if I lift it the normal directrion.
My friend has a similar asymmetric rotary lift. We did an engine swap on a Toyota AW11 MR2. We always mounted that car on the lift backwards due to how weight was in the rear.
I love how the arm of the lift appears to rip it’s way through the side vent.
I’m not a fan of the current vette’s styling.
…pretty sure the coolant pipes in the Fiero are next to the gas tank? In the center of the car? Where you say they aren’t?
Source: my Fiero.
You may want to look a little harder. What’s running next to the gas tank goes to the heater core. The main coolant tubes to the radiator are under the driver and passenger sills.
*squint* Maybe you’re right. Maybe.
I’ve owned an 84, 86 and 88. I think there *may* have been 1 year that ran everything next the tank (88 4cyl maybe?) but everything else ran the tubes along the sills. I remember reading plenty of stories about owners or clueless shops crushing them.
They ran the lines next to the tank on the 88’s. Everything else has the main coolant tubes next to the sills.
I thought all the v6 models still had them in the sills, but it’s been a while since I’ve been in the Fiero game.
Well I definitely haven’t crushed mine (I don’t think)! Gonna have to check anyway because I bought someone else’s project and all…
I parked next to a Merc that still had a lift support attached to it. It was hanging down in front of the front drivers side wheel. Was tempted to grab it and start collecting a set.
Looking at images, it appears they put the lift closer to the C7 locations, and there’s some photos out there of this seemingly same failure on C8’s. The rear lift point is in a weird spot compared to other cars so I see how this could happen.
“Every car has specific lifting points, areas from which a car is designed to be raised.”
Well, sort of. The factory owner’s manual for my Austin Allegro very clearly warns against using the lifting points to lift the vehicle, as this can lead to significant damage. Instead, a jack or lift must make contact at a nondescript location a measured distance away from the highly visible, specifically designed and constructed lifting points.
No, I’m not kidding.
Same story with my Mini. No, none of the parts that look like lifting points are actually lifting points. In fact, you just crushed the floor by saying the word “lift” within 10 feet of it.
In the case of the Allegro it’s half-and-half. I’ve scanned the relevant page of the manual below. Note that at the front there are brackets specifically designed to mate with the custom shape of the jack pad (Figure 1, Step 4) and these are indeed to be used as expected. The identical brackets are present at the rear (Figure 1, Step 5) but they must not be used for jacking even though they serve no other purpose. Instead the car is to be awkwardly supported by the adjacent channel section that doesn’t match the jack pad at all:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53204627793_3ef04bcede_o.jpg
Odd. What’s the reasoning behind this that you’re not supposed to use the jacking point in the rear?
I don’t have the shop manual handy at the moment, which I think goes into more detail than the owner’s manual. As best I recall there’s a danger of flexing the body such that the rear window may pop out. The curious thing is that BL continued to construct the Allegro like this for several years (mine’s an ’82) without either fixing the problem (which I admit is too much to have expected of them), deleting the rear jacking point (also probably a bridge too far), or at least obstructing it with something such that nobody would inadvertently use it. But no, the long-term solution was to print a warning on page 62 of the owner’s manual. Sigh.
Why did that happen?
They failed to recognize the gravity of the situation.
Maybe Chevrolet will issue a safety bulletin. This issue has reached a tipping point
Why it apparently helps sell C8s. Insurance of the dealer buys a new one probably at sticker or at least someone paying the difference between value and new.
I support your statement. Allow me to give it a lift with a like.
Just in time for the fall clearance event.
Everything must go!!
(on to the floor)
The finance guy just wants it gone so he can drop it off their floor plan financing.
If they’re going to raise expectations with a completely new model they could at least let them down easy.
dont blame the tech, he is a real down-to-earth guy
I just don’t get this. Using a lift correctly is not brain surgery. Really.
But the coolest thing I ever saw was a guy I worked with dropped a VW Bus off a lift ass end first. Good times.
If you’re standing under it, it could be brain surgery.
I assume it was a function of technicians being rushed to do the job Quickly instead of doing the job Right.
If that’s a Z06 it could possibly still sell over MSRP at auction despite falling off the lift…. no warranty of course.
this is why a lot of guys, in shops and at home, have those tall screw jacks that hold like 1.5 or 2 tons. One front and one rear, or even just one on the slightly tippier end goes an insane distance in stabilizing the whole system.
Many Corvair mechanics use them.
I noticed that the guys at Munro and Associates use 4 of those in addition to a 2 post lift as you can see in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDjIUJgr2E
I always use these screw jacks front and rear with my 2 post lift. Besides the fact that I installed the lift myself…it just makes me feel like I might have a second longer to get out from under a situation, even if that probably isn’t true. It also keeps things stable when you need to hang on a breaker bar or something. So far, the 2 post lift has been my best automotive purchase ever.