Why workshops are choosing inspection pits for efficiency and throughput

If you’re weighing up the pros and cons of a vehicle inspection pit, you’ll find most of the conversation comes down to the installation: the planning and permissions, and the civil works and structural changes.

But there’s a reason why most concerns are focused on the installation. Once a pit’s up and running, it’s one of the most efficient ways of servicing vehicles — with minimal setup, minimal downtime, and the option for simultaneous services on a single vehicle.

Here’s how an inspection pit helps your workshop efficiency, and improves your vehicle throughput:

It’s always ready

With a vehicle inspection pit, there’s effectively zero setup time to start using it. It’s a fixed installation with no moving parts, so there’s nothing to power up, reset, or reposition.

It’s a simple ‘drive-on, drive-off’ piece of equipment, where the only ‘setup’ you need is to position the vehicle correctly.

Compare that to traditional vehicle lifts, where you need to:

• Power up the lift
• Potentially attach lifting points
• Wait while the vehicle rises
• Wait while the vehicle lowers
• Detach any lifting points
• Power down the lift.

All these steps are adding time to the vehicle’s service, and over the course of a full day, reducing your overall throughput.

When you use an inspection pit, there are no extra steps. Your vehicles drive on, receive a service, and drive off. And in the long term, that means more vehicles serviced, and more happy customers.

There’s almost no downtime

Unlike most other workshop equipment, inspection pits are relatively simple in their functionality:

There are no moving parts or hydraulic systems, which means almost zero wear and tear. That means maintenance and repairs on an inspection pit are minimal, and you’ll have extremely high uptime for your teams to keep working without interruption.

In most cases, the maintenance on a pit involves:

• Draining the central floor sump

Compared to a vehicle lift (with its electronic systems, replacement parts, and hydraulic fluids), a vehicle inspection pit is a low-maintenance installation with minimal maintenance and repairs (which means maximum efficiency and throughput).

You can stack services

One of the biggest benefits of an inspection pit is that you have full access to the entire vehicle — both top and bottom. So while one technician is down in the pit working on the chassis, another can be carrying out bodywork above ground, or running diagnostics in the vehicle’s cabin.

These simultaneous tasks can have a huge impact on your efficiency and throughput, potentially halving the amount of time you spend on each vehicle.

But as well as working both above and below the vehicle, an inspection pit also gives you options to stack different equipment in the same installation, such as:

• An integrated brake tester

Instead of having these tools in separate workstations, they can be built directly into the inspection pit itself. That means you can stack multiple services in a single location, without the need to reposition the vehicle between each job.

It’s a designed environment

While some workshops see the contained space of a pit as a downside, it can actually make your teams more efficient:

It’s a carefully specified working environment that’s designed for a single purpose, which means everything they need is arranged nearby:

• Optimal lighting for the specific space.
• Compressed air and power sockets conveniently on hand.
• Integrated storage for tools and utilities (such as oil).

With a vehicle lift, things aren’t always so convenient. Your teams need to set up the right lighting, bring utilities like oil and air to the lift, and often spend time walking back and forth across the shop floor to find the tools and supporting equipment they need.

You can reclaim the space

Some workshops have been hesitant to choose an inspection pit, with concerns that a fixed installation means losing precious floor space.

But with the right accessory, a pit can actually give you more space than a typical vehicle lift:

With a specially designed pit cover to block the opening of a pit (built to comfortably take the weight of a person), you can reclaim the floor space of your inspection pit when it’s not in use.

While you won’t be able to drive vehicles across it, most pit covers are strong enough to handle the weight of a technician and lightweight tools, which means you can temporarily set up an additional light-work station to make the most of your workshop’s available space. On top of that, it opens up new walking routes across your shop floor, so your staff don’t lose time walking around the gap.

That means more technicians working, less space wasted — and a boost to your overall efficiency and throughput.

Looking to speed up your services?

With a permanent inspection pit that’s always ready to go, your teams can carry out the same high-quality services on more vehicles per day — with minimal setup time and repositioning, and a carefully designed workspace with everything they need.

We’ve helped workshops like yours to build over 200 of our Tecnik vehicle inspection pits, with a prefabricated design that minimises installation time and disruption to your shop.

So if you’re thinking of an upgrade or a new installation, start a chat with one of our inspection pit experts — and we’ll show you everything a modern pit can do.