6 Tools for Car
Maintenance at Home
Everybody knows you need ratchets, sockets, and wrenches to work on a car. This is the other list — the bigger tools I bought for my Turo rental business so I could stop driving to a mechanic or a car wash for jobs I can do in my driveway in minutes. Six tools, what each one actually replaces, and the seventh I'm buying next.
I unbox and explain every one in the video — just under eight minutes.
1. A garage jack
The jack that comes in your trunk — the one you crank by hand — is miserable. A 3-ton garage jack makes a tire change easy. I'd been eyeing the Harbor Freight Daytona for a long time, then watched a comparison video that said the Daytona and the cheaper Husky appear to come out of the same factory with different stickers on them. It recommended the Husky, so that's what I bought, and it's done everything I've needed.
2. Four jack stands
These go hand in hand with the jack, and they're the most important thing on this list. Never get under a car that's only held up by a jack. Jacks can fail. If it fails while you're under the car, the car comes down on you.
I bought four instead of two for one reason: tire rotations. Rotating tires just means moving the front pair to the back and the back pair to the front so the tread wears evenly and lasts longer. With four stands, all four corners are up at once and it's about a 10-minute job at home. I was tired of driving cars to a mechanic for something that simple.
3. An impact
An impact gets lug nuts off in about five seconds instead of fighting them with a breaker bar. Mine's a Milwaukee. It doesn't have to be — Milwaukee is the most expensive brand out there — but I worked on a ship where Milwaukee was the only brand we had, and I've been brainwashed ever since.
One warning: be careful tightening with an impact. You can cross-thread or strip a lug nut, and that's a bad day.
4. A battery-powered vacuum
This is the Turo one. After most trips, the car just has some crumbs in it, and I used to drive it all the way to a car wash to vacuum it. A cordless vacuum means I pull it out, click in a battery, vacuum, done. Even if you never work on your car, having one at the house keeps it clean.
5. A tire inflator
A lot of the time a tire just needs two PSI. Driving to a gas station and paying $3 to add two PSI is annoying. A portable tire inflator fixes that in the driveway.
If you're going cordless on the vacuum, impact, and inflator, remember you also need batteries and a charger. Budget for them — the tools don't come with power.
6. An OBD scanner
Everyone should own one of these, even if you never touch a wrench. Whenever your check-engine light comes on, the car stores a code for what's wrong. Plug in an OBD scanner and it reads that code and tells you what's going on.
That's what saves money. If you know the problem before you walk into a shop, you can say "this is the code, I just need this fixed," and it's a lot harder for anyone to tell you three other things are broken.
Mine is the Autel MaxiCheck MX808S — basically an Android tablet. It's overkill for most people. I bought it because I need to reset certain codes and the oil-life reminder on a Porsche. A regular scanner runs about $80–$120 and does the job that matters.
Next on my list: a cordless ratchet
A lot of small jobs — pulling a bumper cover, taking off an under-body heat shield — are a pile of little bolts I'm still removing by hand. A battery-powered ratchet or screwdriver would zip them out. I saw one on a Donut Media video and realized how much faster they were doing it than me. That's my next purchase.
More of what I use across the fleet — cleaning, detailing, and the rest — is on my car products page.
Keep reading
- 5 Turo Host Mistakes From My First 3 Months — every early mistake with the dollar figure attached
- Best Cars for Turo — what actually rents in a 12-car fleet
I'm a YouTuber in Charleston, South Carolina, and I run a 12-car Turo fleet full-time. These are the tools in my own garage. More about me.
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