Another Corvette Falls Off a Dealer Lift—Is This Becoming a Pattern?

A routine oil change turns disastrous as another rear-heavy C8 Corvette slips off a lift.

Senior Editor
Rear shot of 2024 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 falls off lift in dealership
Jared Adrian George/Facebook
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Jared George traded in his Mercedes-AMG GT for a used but barely-driven 2024 Corvette Z06 with just over 3,000 miles on the clock. Less than a week later, he took it to a Texas dealership for its first oil change. He drove home, noticed an oil drip on his garage floor, and brought it straight back. While the staff was trying to place the car on a lift to diagnose the leak, it slipped. Photos shared to a Corvette owner’s Facebook group show the Arctic White Z06 tilted at a steep angle on a two-post lift, its rear end angled toward the floor while the body leaned heavily to one side. With damage extending past the visual of broken fiberglass panels and gouges in the chassis, this $110,000+ Corvette Z06 is likely written off, thanks to a routine workshop visit.

The Wrong Tool for the Job

A two-post lift was the wrong call here. With the C8’s mid-engine layout pushing roughly 60 percent of the weight over the rear axle, placing it on a two-post lift demands precise positioning and specific lift pad adapters. Get it even slightly wrong, and the physics are unforgiving. Four-post ramp lifts are far more forgiving for this kind of weight distribution, since the car simply drives onto the ramps and sits there stably. Several C8s have already fallen off lifts because of the heavily weighted rear, and yet two-post setups remain the default in most service bays. The C8 also has frame cutouts that an inexperienced technician might mistakenly identify as jacking points when they are actually tie-down slots used during transport. That confusion, combined with a rear-heavy platform most GM techs have never worked on before, is a disaster waiting to happen.

A Pattern That Keeps Repeating

In 2020, a red C8 Stingray fell off a lift after being improperly jacked up, and a blue Corvette suffered the same fate a year later in 2021. Then, in September 2023, a red Z06 slipped during a pre-delivery inspection. Now this. Four incidents (that we know of) in five years involving the same platform and the same failure. Enthusiast forums have been warning about this since the C8 launched.

2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06

Chevrolet

The fix isn’t complicated. Jacking pucks that clip into the correct frame slots make the lift points immediately obvious, and several forum veterans recommend leaving them on the car permanently so any technician can see exactly where to go. Some owners have even suggested GM should mark the spots with high-visibility indicators from the factory. The C8 is not a difficult car to lift safely. It just requires a technician who actually knows what they’re doing, and dealerships, it seems, haven’t gotten that message yet.

About the author

Simran Rastogi

Senior Editor

Simran Rastogi is a senior editor at Autoblog with more than a decade of experience road testing and writing about cars for Indian and international outlets, including OVERDRIVE and India Today. He previously served as an editor at HotCars, managing a team of writers.