It seems that for me the window washing lifts will move up, but they generally will not move down. If I hack the lift I can make it go up with space, but when I hit ctrl I hear the whirring noise of the lift, but the damn thing won't move. It is very frustrating. I was able to work around the lifts not working up to now, but I can't get to the last digital deface activity in Lambeth because I can't get to the roof without being able to lower the damn lift so I can get onto it from a drone. The drones, that also move up and down with space/ctrl all work fine.It's just the window washing lifts and only moving down.

Has anybody else experienced this? Is there a solution?

@Ubi-Deta I have the same issue. I tried changing the key to 'c' no change.
I'm usually looking up at a window washer lift, but I moved my camera angle to a downward facing angle and it freed up.

I only tried this on one lift so far, all previous lifts I gave up as were unusable. Now that I think about it, I think I've seen this issue and work around before. I think the older games might of had the same issue.

Cranes really don't work very well for me in general, driving isn't much better, I was hoping for more progress in these areas. Watchdogs 1 is still my favourite, as I love using remote vehicles too much, but they take the challenge out of it, and Aiden was my fav character.

Anyway I hope this will help someone, if you're having troubles try alternate camera angles.

P.S. If this work around no longer works or is unreliable I'll update this post, otherwise assume it's working for me.

Edit: Tried some more, some lifts there is only one sweet spot on the camera angle that can be very hard to find.

@Ubi-Deta I did look at trying to rebind the keys, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me which option needed rebinding. I tried both the "hold the middle button and then select the key for down" and "hold the middle button, select the key to hijack and then use the different key for down (I think it's C, if memory serves)". Neither worked. I do hear the sound for the washer moving, but it doesn't actually move. I also tried plugging in my controller and using that instead. That didn't help either. I don't think it's an issue of not recognizing the key presses. I thought it might be a physics problem (specifically with the Lambeth hospital one), so I tried having Wrench fire at it with his drone to move the lift and maybe free it. It did move the lift, but I still couldn't move it down even at its new position (and then everybody started shooting back, of course!)

@zin981, thanks for confirming that I'm not the only one struggling with this. Trying different camera angles might be something to try. The trouble with the Lambeth one is that you can't get above it

[Edit:] Okay, I take that back. You can get above it two ways. One, the non-cargo drones can go higher and get above it. I tried flying around above it at multiple different angles but no luck. Second, if you actually hack the lift, it moves the camera to point at the lift and you can swing it around to being a little above. Doing this I was able to move it just a little bit. It seemed pointing the camera towards the corner of the lift had the best success, but then it'll only move a tiny amount before just stopping again. Unfortunately, when I discovered this, I had already moved the lift up a bit in an attempt to see if that might help any (it didn't). So I haven't actually made any progress towards reaching that point on the roof. But, it's some progress at least!

[Another Edit:] After leaving and coming back I was finally, painfully, able to get the lift to drop enough to get in, move up to the roof, and do the final bit I needed in Lambeth. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice the operative by jumping off the roof since there was no way I was going to spend ages trying to get the damn lift to move back down again. I'd hoped she might land on the drone, but I missed it. Oh well. Glad I wasn't playing permadeath...