DIY Auto Repair Shops Might Be Making a Comeback
Small shops let you rent a lift and all the tools you need for $45 an hour.By Mark VaughnPublished: Oct 01, 2025 10:49 AM EDT
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CoGarage
- A new shop in Southern California may represent a trend: DIY auto repair shops where you pay a fee, they jack your car up on a lift, and you do the work.
- Such places used to be common, then they went away, but there’s hope!
- CoGarage in El Monte, California, rents lifts and tools for $45 an hour.
Are Do-It-Yourself car repair shops making a comeback?
At one time those kinds of shops were all over the country. If you were in the Army, MWR had shops like that at bases all over the world. They operated on a simple rental basis: You’d pay an hourly fee, jack your car up on a real lift, and save money by doing your own work.
Of course, that was also at a time when they taught auto shop in high school—and metal shop, wood shop, electric shop, and print shop. But, as the popular meme goes, “50 years ago the owner’s manual of a car showed you how to adjust the valves. Today it warns you not to drink the contents of the battery.”CoGarage
CoGarage in El Monte rents lifts for $45 an hour.
Remember the movie Christine? In between all the killin’ an’ squashin’, “Arnie,” the kid who owned the car, rented a spot in just such a shop to work on his beloved 1958 Plymouth Fury. He was set straight right off the bat by the shop’s cigar-chomping owner, who barks to Arnie that, “This place is for working stiffs gotta keep their cars running so they can keep bread on the table.”Mark Vaughn
CoGarage owner, JD Veloz.
That shop owner is eventually squashed by Christine, too, but that’s beside the point.
While it’s true that fewer and fewer people are doing their own car repairs anymore, there are a few glimmers of hope on the DIY horizon. There’s a website called diyshopfinder.com that will direct you to places across the country that rent shop space for you to work on your car. Right now it looks like there are only six or seven of them listed on that site, from Florida to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Texas.
I found one in Southern California called CoGarage at 4007 Baldwin Ave. in El Monte. It opened in January with four two-post lifts and as many tools as you’re likely to need for any job.
“We’re trying to get the word out that a garage like this exists to help people out, because you don’t have many options when you want to fix a car, it’s either you do it at home or you take it somewhere to get it repaired,” said owner JD Veloz (“Veloz like fast in Spanish.”)
Veloz worked at Silvercar rental agency, then at customer service at American Honda headquarters in Torrance, then at Carvana and finally at Lucid – first on the service side and then doing deliveries – before starting CoGarage. What was his original idea?
“It was literally a garage like this, a shared garage to be able to work on my own car, because I lived in an apartment, so I couldn’t do any work on it. I was looking for a garage, maybe two or three lifts. And luckily, I found this one that was big enough to hold four lifts.”
Each lift comes with its own toolbox that Veloz says has just about every tool you’ll need: pliers, hammers, wrenches, and sockets. If there’s something he doesn’t have, he’ll buy it, figuring someone else will need it down the line.Mark Vaughn
Jackson, Travis, and Nick.
One trio of friends—Jackson, Travis, and Nick—had rented Lift #4, had just welded in a new muffler to their Toyota exhaust, and were installing it as we spoke.
“He’s the brains,” said Jackson, pointing to Travis, the welder. The brains had brought a welder’s face mask, so maybe he was brainy.
You, Too, Can DIY
They were all working fast to keep under the $45-an-hour limit. Though if they were to go over that time, they could pay for just another half hour, not the full 60 minutes. Veloz is flexible.
The plan is ultimately to have one of these shops in every major city, Veloz said. (It sounds reasonable. Anyone want to back this project?) There is insurance that covers this specific type of operation, called “shop insurance,” Veloz said. Within that you can specify “DIY shop.” For safety purposes, Veloz is the only one setting up and operating the lifts; customers can’t do that. Which sounds like a good caveat. Veloz is also there to offer advice and counsel.
But the proprietor sees a greater purpose to his endeavor. Veloz wants to turn the location into a community, where socializing is part of the project-car purpose.
“I love it. I meet so many people, and then when people are here and the garage is full, they’ll usually start interacting with each other. There’s not really many places where you can go and meet people, like car people. There’s Cars and Coffee, and there’s street takeovers, which are dangerous and illegal. People need somewhere to go. And, I hope, we’re here to kind of give people somewhere to go.”Columbia Pictures
Don’t make her mad…
Toward that end, Veloz has added purely social events after hours. This Friday night, October 3, he’s doing a drive-in movie showing of, I am not making this up, Christine. Just in time for Halloween. Sign up now at cogarage.com before space is full. It’s a good movie, starring a pre-Repo Man Harry Dean Stanton and a pre-Baywatch Alexandra Paul.
See you there.
Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed the Blue Oval, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
Ford and GM Try to Stretch EV Tax Credit Past Expiration with Dealer Programs
The workaround will allow buyers to continue to benefit from the $7,500 savings on EVs, though the federal tax credit officially expires after today.By Natalie NeffPublished: Sep 30, 2025 11:12 AM EDTSave Article
Cadillac
As the federal $7,500 EV tax credit officially ends today, Reuters reports Ford and General Motors are engineering workarounds to keep incentives alive—for now, at least.
Both automakers are rolling out programs to allow dealers to continue offering lease deals with the tax credit built-in, shielding EV shoppers from the sudden loss in savings.
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The programs work this way: through their financing arms, Ford and GM will make down payments on electric vehicles sitting in dealer inventory. This prepayment qualifies the financing arms themselves to claim the $7,500 credit. From there, dealers can lease those vehicles to consumers with the subsidy effectively passed through—keeping lease payments low even after the credit technically expires.
Ford’s program extends this buffer through December 31. GM, meanwhile, is coordinating with its dealer network to continue EV lease deals that emulate the current tax-break model.
The move comes after months of speculation that the subsidy’s abrupt cutoff would choke the US EV market, pressuring automakers and consumers alike.
Reports suggest Ford and GM consulted with IRS officials to ensure compliance. Yet the strategy underscores just how dependent the EV sector has become on tax incentives, and how fragile that dependence is when policy changes loom.
Especially after years of building momentum, losing the credit cold could tip the scales back to internal combustion for some buyers. For now, Ford and GM are dialing down that risk, giving the industry a few more months to adjust.
But for a couple of sketchy, short-lived gigs right out of college, Natalie Neff has had the good fortune to spend the entirety of her professional life around cars. A 2017 Honda Ridgeline, 1972 VW Beetle, 1999 Ducati Monster and a well-loved purple-and-white five-speed Schwinn currently call her garage home.
