Jacking up a car is pretty simple, but not quite as simple as you might think. The most important thing to keep in mind when jacking up your car is to mount the jack at the right point under the car, otherwise you can easily end up damaging your car. It’s not always easy to determine where the right point is, however.
If you have an electric car that needs to be jacked up, you might be wondering if the correct procedure is any different for your car; after all, electric cars are mechanically different from gasoline cars in many ways, so maybe the mounting points for a jack are also different. As it turns out, though, jacking up an electric car isn’t significantly different from jacking up a gas car.
In this article, we’ll be going over everything you should know about jacking up your electric car, including how to do it safely.
What to Know About Jacking Up an Electric Car
As we’ve mentioned, the procedure for jacking up an electric car is basically the same as jacking up a regular car. You just need to mount the jack at the proper spot to avoid damaging your car, although it’s pretty easy to make a mistake and think you’re jacking up the car in the right place when you actually aren’t.
It’s also a bit riskier to jack up an electric car incorrectly than it is a gas car. If you mount the jack in the wrong spot on a gas car, you might accidentally end up bending or breaking the floor pan. If you really screw up, you might end up bending the door or damaging some of your suspension components, which will obviously be expensive to fix.
In most electric cars, however, much of the space underneath the car is taken up by the battery pack. This means that an incorrectly-placed jack can damage or potentially even puncture your car’s battery pack, which can cause a battery fire under the right circumstances.
It’s worth mentioning that your car might not even come with a jack to begin with. Many manufacturers these days are choosing to skip putting a jack and spare tire in their cars, in an effort to save trunk space and keep overall costs down. Oftentimes, manufacturers will just include a tire patch kit.
How to Jack Up Your Electric Car
Again, with all that being said, jacking up an electric car is not really any different from jacking up a gas car. You might want to be a little more careful when working on an electric car in this way, but the actual procedure is basically the same.
There are some minor exceptions, however; for example, the BMW i3 needs a special jack adapter to prevent a normal jack from damaging the carbon fiber chassis. Some Teslas also require similar adapters, which look kind of like hockey pucks. Other manufacturers don’t require anything like this, however; it all depends on what kind of car you’re working on.
Assuming you have all of the necessary adapters, if any are required, here’s how to go about jacking up your electric car:
Step 1: Secure the Vehicle
Before you actually start jacking your car up, it’s important that you set everything up correctly to prevent yourself from being injured in the process. Most of this stuff is common sense, but it never hurts to review.
For starters, you should make sure that the car is off and that the electronic parking brake is on. You absolutely do not want the car to start moving once you’ve jacked it up, as you run the risk of severely injuring yourself if the car falls on you. For this reason, you should also avoid jacking your car up on an uneven surface.
In addition, it’s never a bad idea to chock your wheels as an extra safety measure. To prevent the car from rolling, make sure you chock the wheel on the opposite corner from the wheel you want to jack up.
Step 2: Find the Jacking Points and Position the Jack
Once you’ve made sure that your car is properly secured in place, you can start jacking it up. If you have access to a hydraulic floor jack, you should use this instead of the car’s emergency jack, if it has one; a hydraulic floor jack will be stronger and sturdier. You should only use the emergency jack if you have no other options.
Pretty much every car has four jacking points, which are located just behind the front wheels and just in front of the rear wheels. If you want to know the exact spot your car’s jacking points are in (which you should find out before jacking up your car), your owner’s manual should contain this information.
Once you’ve found the jacking point you want to use, make sure the jack is positioned correctly on it before using it. Don’t jack the car up if the jack is only partially resting on the jacking point; they need to be fully in contact with each other.
Step 3: Jack Up the Car
With the jack securely in place, you can now start jacking up your car. Make sure the jack stays positioned straight up and down as the car is lifted; if it’s leaning, lower the car, reposition the jack and try again.
Once you have the car jacked up as high as you want it, you need to install a jack stand to keep it held up. This will help protect you if the jack slips or breaks while the car is jacked up. When the jack stand is in place, you can safely perform whatever work on your car that you want.
Step 4: Lower the Car
When you’ve finished doing whatever work you need to do, you can remove the jack stand and start lowering the car again with the jack. If you’re using a hydraulic jack, you can do this by opening the jack’s release valve. Once the vehicle is fully back on the ground, you can safely remove the jack as well as any wheel chocks you used.
You should be extra careful when you jack up an electric car
Its not dangerous when you do it correct, but you need to make sure you are using the correct jacking points. If you dont do that you can damage the whole battery pack. Therefore make sure you are using a correct jack with the correct pad for the jack (if thats needed).
If you drive over something like a rock you can also damage the battery pack completely on an electric vehicle. Thats proves the point of why its very important you make sure its the right jacking points you are using.