Mechanic never put car on the lift

I took my 2020 prius prime with 81,630 miles to my mechanic today for an oil change and a WS transmission fluid drain and fill. They have a window you can peek through to see all the cars on the lifts. They pulled my car up right outside of the garage behind one of the full lifts. I peeked through the window once in a while, maybe every 15 minutes or so. The car never moved. Then about 1.5-2 hours later they drove the car back around to the front of the shop and said it's ready. I responded, "but I didn't see the car go on the lift," with a confused look on my face. They said they jacked up the car and did the services. I responded, "But how do you know if the car is level?" They said they measured the amount of ATF they drained and it was 3.5 quarts, so they put 3.5 quarts back in. They said they do this all the time. When I peeked through the window each time, I never saw the hood of the car open.

Does this sound like a likely explanation to you? I never had a full view of the car, so I may not have realized it was on jack stands. Is it common for a shop to lift a car with a jack (and I assume jack stands) if all of their lifts are full with cars. It sounds reasonable to me, but I have never seen this before. I checked the engine oil on the dipstick and it was clean and at a good level. The problem is that I used less than 20 gallons of gas between now and the last oil change, so the oil looked just as clean before the change too. I can't tell, but the oil level may be slightly higher or the same as prior to the oil change. They used about ~ 4.6 quarts of oil on the previous oil change and the remaining 0.4 quart + 4 new quarts of oil on this change (assuming it was done).

I do not have any tools to lift the car or access the ATF fill hole and my 1 car garage is so small that I can barely get out of the car without dinging the door. Thus, I really don't want to check the ATF myself. Is this really something I should worry about? Am I just being paranoid?

 

Yes, the lifts were all tied up the whole time. They had 2 rows of 3 lifts and all 6 of them had cars on them the whole time. I did not pay attention if any of the lifts turned over.

 

Good to know someone has had experience with a shop not waiting for a lift to do services. I wasn't paying that much attention to how often I peaked through the window, so maybe the hood was open for more than 15 minutes. I wonder if that super thin 0w16 oil can be drained at reasonable speed without even opening the hood/cap. Then they would only need to open up the hood for a couple minutes to poor in the 4.4 quarts of oil I gave them. I don't think the tranny drain and fill would need the hood open at all.

 

I think I am going to take it to another shop for it's next oil change or sooner and ask if they can check the quality of the transmission fluid visually. Hopefully they can tell by what appears on their finger from the fill hole, so I don't have to add any more fluid if it looks good. I'm not that concerned about the level. Either they did nothing or they put back the same amount of fluid they put in. Either way, I wouldn't expect it to be significantly over or underfilled.

 

I am not sure an oil analysis test will tell much. I got the last oil change 6 months ago and only burned about 8.5 gallons of gas. That means I only had the engine running for about 500 miles. I probably wouldn't bother getting this done until the next oil change. Would oil that has sat in the engine for 1 year and 1,000 miles look much different than oil that sat in the engine for 6 months and 500 miles? It might, but I doubt I would get a definitive answer. I would change it only once a year, but I just can't get myself to let it go over 10,000 miles, regardless of how much of them are EV miles. I would guess the more definitive test would be if the tranmission fluid still looked black.

 

Good to know there will be a few clear signs another shop should be able to find if the transmission service wasn't done. I think it's about a coin toss as to whether anything was done on the car that day. If I wait till the next oil change, sounds like the worst case scenario is that I let the car go 1 year and 18,000-19,000 total miles (but only about 1,000 miles with the ICE on) without an oil change and 5 years/90,000 miles before its first ATF drain and fill. Since I haven't towed anything and mostly drive 55-60 mph in the right lane behind the slower trucks on the highway, I am guessing this plan should be okay.

 

Unfortunately I think it was the owner who I was talking to. Earlier in the visit, he started rambling about how I would see more of him from now on. He stated the guy I saw at the front desk during all my previous visits was stealing from him by deleating invoices in the computer system that were paid in cash. I found it odd and unprofessional that he told me this because I never asked why the other guy wasn't there. I wonder if he looked at me as a way to recoup some of his losses. This place had such good reviews on yelp with 4.8 stars and 381 reviews, but looking back, there were a few red flags. They gave me big cash discount for a repair once, well more than the 3.5% they normally give, which is comparable to the fees the credit card companies charge small businesses. I overlooked this and the dirty unorganized shop because they let me bring a toyota oil and filter and just charged me an honest price for the labor. The previous guy at the front desk was friendly and showed me a photo of the old ATF fluid along with them putting in the new fluid into my Prius C a few months ago. However their shop was dirty and very unorganized. Now that I have filtered yelp reviews to one star ones, I found the owner's responses to be very defensive. I might not go back even if I did find out the services were done.