Where I am they will absolutely not let me in the shop, always busy in this area and I’m sure liability will be a problem as most have mentioned.
Guess I’ll just have to wait for something else to need fixing before I get my hands dirty again…
It is a liability issue. Trust me. I had someone’s Subaru in the shop once and the car needed a special order part. The car was going to be down all week. The husband and wife (casual friends of the dealership owner) wanted to come back in the shop and remove some personals from the glove box. The owner walked back there with them and the husband engaged me in a brief conversation over his car before they left.
They came back Friday afternoon, paid the bill, and motored off; apparently happy.
Several months later my boss gets a letter from an attorney which claimed the wife had tripped over an air hose “negligently left lying on the shop floor” and was suffering headaches and so on.
She tripped over nothing; both the boss and I were there the entire 5 minutes they were in the shop.
It cost my boss several thousand dollars to make this problem go away.
Not saying that you would do this at all. Just pointing out how serious a liability issue can be and even worse in this case because the couple were alleged friends of the owner. Not so much friends after that…