Car Talk is the humorous work of "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers", Tom and Ray Magliozzi, on automobile repair. Originally, Car Talk was a radio show that ran on National Public Radio (NPR) from 1977 until October 2012, when the Magliozzi brothers retired. Since their retirement, the oeuvre now includes a websiteOfficial Car Talk website and a podcast of reruns that is currently hosted by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR Podcasts, and Stitcher.Our Show In 2025 Ray Magliozzi began hosting a revived version of Car Talk called Car Talk+. The Car Talk radio show was honored with a Peabody Award in 1992, and the Magliozzis were both inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2014 and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2018.Isidore, Chris (April 25, 2018). "Car Talk hosts are headed to the Automotive Hall of Fame". CNN. Accessed February 22, 2023.
Premise Car Talk was presented in the form of a call-in radio show: listeners called in with questions related to motor vehicle maintenance and repair. Most of the advice sought was diagnostic, with callers describing symptoms and demonstrating sounds of an ailing vehicle while the Magliozzis made an attempt to identify the malfunction over the telephone and give advice on how to fix it. While the hosts peppered their call-in sessions with jokes directed at both the caller and at themselves, the Magliozzis were usually able to arrive at a diagnosis. However, when they were stumped, they attempted anyway with an answer they claimed was "unencumbered by the thought process", the official motto of the show.
Edited reruns are carried on XM Satellite Radio (now SiriusXM) via both the Public Radio and NPR Now channels.
The Car Talk theme music is "Dawggy Mountain Breakdown" by bluegrass artist David Grisman.
Call-in procedure Throughout the program, listeners were encouraged to dial the toll-free telephone number, 1-888-CAR-TALK (1-888-227-8255), which connected to a 24-hour answering service. Although the approximately 2,000 queries received each week were screened by the Car Talk staff, the questions were unknown to the Magliozzis in advance as "that would entail researching the right answer, which is what? ... Work."
Features
The show originally consisted of two segments with a break in between but was changed to three segments. After the shift to the three-segment format, it became a running joke to refer to the last segment as "the third half" of the program.
The show opened with a short comedy segment, typically jokes sent in by listeners, followed by eight call-in sessions. The hosts ran a contest called the "Puzzler", in which a riddle, sometimes car-related, was presented. The answer to the previous week's "Puzzler" was given at the beginning of the "second half" of the show, and a new "Puzzler" was given at the start of the "third half". The hosts gave instructions to listeners to write answers addressed to "Puzzler Tower" on some non-existent or expensive object, such as a "$26 bill" or an advanced DSLR camera. This gag initially started as suggestions that the answers be written "on the back of a $20 bill". A running gag concerned Tom's inability to remember the previous week's "Puzzler" without heavy prompting from Ray. During a tribute show following Tom's death in 2014 due to complications of Alzheimer's disease, Ray joked, "I guess he wasn't joking about not being able to remember the puzzler all those years." For each puzzler, one correct answer was chosen at random, with the winner receiving a $26 gift certificate to the Car Talk store, referred to as the "Shameless Commerce Division"."Puzzler"; , Car Talk website It was originally $25, but was increased for inflation after a few years. Originally, the winner received a specific item from the store, but it soon changed to a gift certificate to allow the winner to choose the item they wanted (though Tom often made an item suggestion).
A recurring feature was "Stump the Chumps," in which the hosts revisited a caller from a previous show to determine the accuracy and the effect, if any, of their advice. A similar feature began in May 2001, "Where Are They Now, Tommy?" It began with a comical musical theme with a sputtering, backfiring car engine and a horn as a backdrop. Tom then announced who the previous caller was, followed by a short replay of the essence of the previous call, preceded and followed by harp music often used in other audiovisual media to indicate recalling and returning from a dream. The hosts then greeted the previous caller, confirmed that they had not spoken since their previous appearance and asked them if there had been any influences on the answer they were about to relate, such as arcane bribes by the NPR staff. The repair story was then discussed, followed by a fanfare and applause if the Tappet Brothers' diagnosis was correct, or a wah-wah-wah music piece mixed with a car starter operated by a weak battery (an engine which wouldn't start) if the diagnosis was wrong. The hosts then thanked the caller for their return appearance.
The brothers also had an official Animal-Vehicle Biologist and Wildlife Guru named Kieran Lindsey. She answered questions like "How do I remove a snake from my car?" and offered advice on how those living in cities and suburbs could reconnect with wildlife. They also would sometimes rely on Harvard University professors Wolfgang Rueckner and Jim E. Davis for questions concerning physics and chemistry, respectively.
There were numerous appearances from NPR personalities, including Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Scott Simon, Ray Suarez, Will Shortz, Sylvia Poggioli, and commentator and author Daniel Pinkwater. On one occasion, the show featured Martha Stewart as an in-studio guest, whom the Magliozzis twice during the segment referred to as "Margaret". Celebrities and public figures were featured as "callers" as well, including Geena Davis, Ashley Judd, Morley Safer, Gordon Elliott, former Major League Baseball pitcher Bill Lee, journalist Farhad Manjoo, and astronaut John M. Grunsfeld.
Space program calls Astronaut and engineer John Grunsfeld called into the show during Space Shuttle mission STS-81 in January 1997, in which Atlantis docked to the Mir space station. In this call he complained about the performance of his serial-numbered, Rockwell-manufactured "government van". To wit, it would run very loud and rough for about two minutes, quieter and smoother for another six and a half, and then the engine would stop with a jolt. He went on to state that the brakes of the vehicle, when applied, would glow red-hot, and that the vehicle's odometer displayed "about 60 million miles". This created some consternation for the hosts, until they noticed the audio of Grunsfeld's voice, being relayed from Mir via TDRS satellite, sounded similar to that of Tom Hanks in the then-recent film Apollo 13, after which they realized the call was from space and the government van in question was, in fact, the Space Shuttle.
In addition to the on-orbit call, the Brothers once received a call asking advice on winterizing an electric car. When they asked what kind of car, the caller stated it was a "kit car", a $400 million "kit car". It was a joke call from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory concerning the preparation of the Mars Opportunity rover for the oncoming Martian winter, during which temperatures drop to several hundred degrees below freezing.
Click and Clack have also been featured in editorial cartoons, including one where a befuddled NASA engineer called them to ask how to fix the Space Shuttle.
Humor
Humor and wisecracking pervaded the program. Tom and Ray are known for their self-deprecating humor, often joking about the supposedly poor quality of their advice and the show in general. They also commented at the end of each show: "Well, it's happened again—you've wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk."
The phrase "our fair city" was introduced during a puzzler segment on the radio show. Ray presented a puzzler involving a well-dressed man who referred to a city as "your fair city." Tom found the phrase amusing and began using it humorously to refer to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the show was based. This playful reference quickly became a running joke on the show, with the hosts frequently referring to Cambridge as "our fair city" in subsequent episodes.
The ending credits of the show started with thanks to the colorfully nicknamed actual staffers: producer Doug "the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion, bongo boy frogman" Berman; "John 'Bugsy' Lawlor, just back from the ..." every week a different eating event with rhyming foodstuff names; David "Calves of Belleville" Greene; Catherine "Frau Blücher" Fenollosa, whose name caused a horse to neigh and gallop (an allusion to a running gag in the movie Young Frankenstein); and Carly "High Voltage" Nix, among others. Following the real staff was a lengthy list of pun-filled fictional staffers and sponsors such as statistician Marge Innovera ("margin of error"), customer care representative Haywood Jabuzoff ("Hey, would ya buzz off"), meteorologist Claudio Vernight ("cloudy overnight"), optometric firm C. F. Eye Care ("see if I care"), Russian chauffeur Picov Andropov ("pick up and drop off"), Leo Tolstoy biographer Warren Peace ("War and Peace"), hygiene officer and chief of the Tokyo office Oteka Shawa ("oh, take a shower"), Swedish snowboard instructor Soren Derkeister ("sore in the keister"), law firm Dewey, Cheetham & Howe ("Do we cheat 'em? And how!"), Greek tailor Euripides Eumenades ("You rip-a these, you mend-a these"), cloakroom attendant Mahatma Coate ("My hat, my coat"), seat cushion tester Mike Easter (my keister) and many, many others, usually concluding with Erasmus B. Dragon ("Her ass must be draggin), whose job title varied, but who was often said to be head of the show's working mothers' support group. They sometimes advised that "our chief counsel from the law firm of Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe is Hugh Louis Dewey, known to a group of people in Harvard Square as Huey Louie Dewey." (Huey, Louie, and Dewey were the juvenile nephews being raised by Donald Duck in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.) Guest accommodations were provided by The Horseshoe Road Inn ("the horse you rode in").
At the end of the show, Ray warns the audience, "Don't drive like my brother!" to which Tom replies, "And don't drive like my brother!" The original tag line was "Don't drive like a knucklehead!" There were variations such as, "Don't drive like my brother ..." "And don't drive like his brother!" and "Don't drive like my sister ..." "And don't drive like my sister!" The tagline was heard in the Pixar film Cars, in which Tom and Ray voiced anthropomorphized vehicles (Rusty and Dusty Rust-eze, respectively a 1963 Dodge Dart and 1963 Dodge A100 van, as Lightning McQueen's racing sponsors) with personalities similar to their own on-air personae.. Retrieved on June 25, 2007. Tom notoriously once owned a "convertible, green with large areas of rust!" Dodge Dart, known jokingly on the program by the faux-elegant name "Dartre".
History In 1977, radio station WBUR-FM in Boston scheduled a panel of local car mechanics to discuss car repairs on one of its programs, but only Tom Magliozzi showed up. He did so well that he was asked to return as a guest, and he invited his younger brother Ray (who was actually more of a car repair expert) to join him. The brothers were soon asked to host their own radio show on WBUR, which they continued to do every week. In 1986, NPR decided to distribute their show nationally.
In 1989, the brothers started a newspaper column Click and Clack Talk Cars which, like the radio show, mixed serious advice with humor. King Features distributes the column. Ray Magliozzi continues to write the column, retitled Car Talk, after his brother's death in 2014, knowing he would have wanted the advice and humor to continue.