Is it safe for a tire shop to lift my car using 4 rolling floor jacks without any jack stands?

Here’s why the tire shop isn’t doing anything wrong, lifting your car on floor jacks alone.

If you’ve come across this blog post, chances are you’re watching one or all of your tires on your car getting replaced or repaired. Maybe you’re getting a tire rotation.

But, instead of putting your car up on a lift or securing it on jack stands, they have pride and joy up in the air using floor jacks alone.

Discount Tire does this a lot.

Whether you work on cars or not, you might’ve heard it’s a bad idea to work on a car using just floor jacks. It’s a safety issue, your car might shift and come toppling down.

So, what gives? Why are these tire shop employees doing something dangerous?

While your prior knowledge and gut feeling is correct, here’s why, while it’s not 100 percent safe (few things ever are, really), it’s a perfectly acceptable when it comes to wheel and tire repairs, tire rotations, and the like, to lift your car with floor jacks only.

The main reason floor jacks are acceptable is tire employees will not be crawling underneath your car to make repairs, they’re just taking off wheels and tires and putting them back on.

They’re not crawling underneath to do an oil change, fiddling around with your transmission, or are doing extensive suspension and brake work where their legs are laying flat underneath your car, they’re just on the outer edges.

If, on the rare occasion a floor jack fails, it’ll fall on the ground, that’s it.

Even then, with four floor jacks, if one fails you’ve got the other three holding your car up.

If it’s a legitimate tire shop, most likely they’ve got some serious, heavy-duty floor jacks with more than enough lifting capabilities to handle even the heaviest vehicle.

A quick look on Harbor Freight and the most common floor jack is good for 3-tons. With four, we’re talking about 24,000 pounds total.

The electric Hummer, a large, military-style SUV from GM (the one that Biden drove) with a super heavy battery barely weighs close to 10,000 pounds so, if four floor jacks can handle a Hummer EV, it can handle whatever you bring in.

Embed from Getty Images

Finally, if it’s a major tire chain, they’ve probably got a company policy to inspect and oil jacks, daily, further decreasing the chances of a floor jack failing on the job.

Credit to you for being concerned for your car and the safety of the employees that are working on it but, while it looks unconventional, lifting your car with floor jacks for tire work is a tried and true industry standard.

Have you ever seen a tire shop employee lift your car with just floor jacks before?

What did you think?

Let me know your .02 in the comments below.