An RV and trailer service shop in southeast Iowa (Ottumwa area) decided last year to add a car lift automotive bay to their existing operation, mostly to handle the passenger cars and light trucks their seasonal-storage customers dropped off along with their motorhomes. We are Auto Lift Services out of Ames, and we helped them plan, install, and refine the bay through its first full year of operation. What follows is the story of that project, from initial concept through what they changed after six months. If you run a mixed-service shop and you are thinking about adding a lift bay for cars alongside heavier work, this is a template you can follow.
Mixed-service shops need lifts sized for both storage cars and daily-driver work. We spec every bay for the actual vehicle mix.
Why an RV shop added a car lift automotive bay
The origin story: the shop had built a seasonal-storage business over about eight years, holding customers’ RVs and travel trailers through the winter and doing spring de-winterization every April. Along the way, customers started asking whether the shop could hold their cars too, particularly convertibles and older classics they did not want sitting outside all winter. Cars are simpler than RVs to store, but there is one specific problem: without a car lift automotive setup, the shop could not do wheel work, brake work, or the seasonal service that stored cars typically need before customers pick them up in the spring.
The choice was either turn away the car-storage business, or add a proper lift bay. Turning it away meant leaving revenue on the table and inconveniencing existing RV customers. Adding the bay meant a real capital investment plus a workflow change. The owner ran the numbers on projected car-storage revenue plus the spring service work each car needed, and the payback on a well-spec’d car lift automotive install worked out to less than three years. That was enough. They committed to the project and we started the design work in late summer.
The layout problem: mixing RVs and cars in one building
The immediate design challenge was fitting a car lift bay into a building that was originally designed for RV service. The existing building had 16-foot ceilings and 40-foot-long service bays, which is plenty of ceiling for any car lift automotive setup and plenty of length for the longest RV coach. The problem was that the bay doors were sized for RVs (12 feet wide by 14 feet tall), which is fine for cars but means the bay was oversized for car work. Squeezing a 2-post into a 40-foot-deep bay left a lot of unused floor space.
The solution we arrived at was to divide one of the existing bays lengthwise into two work stations: a car-service station at the front with the 2-post lift, and a car-storage or staging area at the rear where cars could be parked on the floor before or after service. This kept the bay in use for larger vehicles when needed by rolling the storage cars out of the rear staging area, while dedicating the front to the car lift automotive workflow. The layout took several sketches to finalize but ended up serving both purposes without a full building expansion.
Choosing the lift for a mixed-service shop
The vehicle mix drove the lift selection. On the car side they expected mostly sedans, SUVs, and half-ton trucks (customers of the RV storage business, who tend to drive standard family vehicles). On the RV side they needed the lift not to interfere with any RV service happening in adjacent bays. That pointed to a 10,000 pound overhead commercial 2-post from Rotary. Overhead configuration was fine because the 16-foot ceilings had plenty of headroom for the crosstube. Ten-thousand pound capacity gave margin for the heaviest half-tons and the occasional customer three-quarter ton. Overhead crossover meant no floor cross-run to trip over when moving RV parts through the same building.
The single-phase 220-volt power unit worked with the shop’s existing electrical service without a utility upgrade. Three-stage arms with truck adapters handled the vehicle mix cleanly. We ordered the lift with a rolling floor jack and a set of pad extenders as accessories, plus a wall-mounted air-line kit so pneumatic tools could be run from the existing shop compressor. Total car lift automotive package came in on the lower end of the mid-range commercial 2-post pricing, which was in the budget the owner had set for the project.
The first install: what surprised us
Install day held two surprises. First, the existing slab in the bay had been poured in three separate segments over the shop’s life, with cold joints between the segments. Our anchor placement plan needed to be adjusted so all four anchors landed within a single slab segment, not straddling a cold joint. That took a shift of about two feet on the lift centerline, which the owner approved on site. Second, the shop compressor was undersized for the pneumatic-arm restraint kit we had included. That was an easy fix (add an inline regulator and step up the airline diameter) but it added a couple of hours to the install.
Neither surprise was a car lift automotive problem in itself. They were building-specific issues that show up on install day at any mixed-service shop with older construction. The lesson we took away and now share with other mixed-service shop owners: do a pre-install site walk-through with the installer, not just a phone conversation. Photos and measurements are helpful, but nothing substitutes for standing in the bay with the installer and confirming the anchor plan against the actual slab. Two hours of pre-install site time saves an entire second day of install-day surprises.
Season one workflow: seasonal storage rotation
The first winter, the shop stored 14 cars in addition to its usual RV load. The workflow that emerged: customers dropped cars off in late October or November, the shop did a pre-storage service (fluid check, tire pressure, battery disconnect, and any immediate needs like a brake pad change if the customer flagged it), and the car went to a designated storage spot. In April, each car came off storage, went up on the car lift automotive setup for a full pre-season inspection, and had whatever spring service the customer wanted (oil change, tire rotation, brake bleed, alignment check).
The lift bay ran essentially back-to-back for the entire month of April. That was the shop’s busiest month on the car side, and the lift handled it without hiccups. Same lift also did some in-season work for the RV side (a couple of tow-vehicle brake jobs, a suspension diagnosis on a fifth-wheel-tow truck). Total lift hours for the first year came in higher than the owner had projected, which meant the payback timeline shortened. This is a common outcome we see when a shop adds a car lift automotive bay: the utilization exceeds expectations because the lift ends up doing work that used to get subbed out.
What we changed after six months
Six months in, two operational changes came out of experience. First, the shop reorganized the storage-staging area to keep cars in a rotation order that matched their pickup dates, rather than random. That cut the shuffle time in April dramatically. Second, the shop added a wheeled tool cart specifically for the car bay, stocked with the tools needed for the top 10 car-service jobs they were doing. Previously, techs were walking back and forth to the RV toolboxes for common car tools, which lost time on every job.
On the equipment side, we added an air-operated tire changer and balancer to the bay midway through year one because the tire work alone was justifying the equipment cost. We also added a set of long-reach jack stands as a backup safety layer for any car lift automotive job where the tech was under the vehicle for extended periods. Neither addition was necessary for the lift to function, but both made the bay more productive. The lesson: a lift bay is a system, not a single tool, and refining the system over the first year is normal and expected.
Year-end review: was it worth it
At the 12-month mark we did a formal review with the shop owner. Total car-side revenue was well ahead of projections. Payback on the car lift automotive investment was tracking to roughly 24 months instead of the projected 36. Customer feedback from RV owners who had also stored cars was uniformly positive, and several had already committed to storing again the following winter. On the operational side, the mixed-service model was more complex than pure-RV service, but not enough to be a burden. The two workflows coexisted in the same building without significant conflicts.
Would he do it again? Yes, and in fact he is considering a second lift, potentially a 4-post storage lift, to double-stack cars over the winter and free up floor space. That is a common year-two decision on mixed-service shops that get their first the lift bay right. If you are running a similar shop in southeast Iowa or elsewhere in the state and thinking about adding a lift bay, we would like to help you plan it. Call us at 800-674-9302 with your shop dimensions, your vehicle mix expectations, and your existing electrical service, and we will lay out a first-year plan that avoids the common pitfalls.
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