Car Talk: A Personal 10 Year Retrospective
Driving around where I grew up, flipping between the Philadelphia and New York City public radio stations depending on which part of the county I’m in, my mind drifts back to a driving force in my early engineering education: National Public Radio's Car Talk. This October was the 10 year anniversary of Car Talk’s last new episode, but the show is the ultimate in audio based debug puzzles.
Tom and Ray, hosts of Car Talk and brothers from Massachusetts with degrees from MIT, were mechanics first and radio hosts second. They were seriously brilliant and must have had an incredible research team backing them, but above all they had an ability to engage with people of all walks of life and manner of 4-wheeled motor vehicle. The pair broadcast the show from Cambridge’s Harvard Square for decades before retiring 10 years ago.
Every segment and episode of Car Talk brings a lesson. The conceit is simple: start the show with puns and witticisms, then move on to calls with real people in an attempt to do automotive diagnostics-over-FM-radio. Nearly every caller onomatopoetically describes their issue, and genius is at work when the hosts of the program respond with their own mimicry of a motor vehicle in an attempt to perform differential diagnosis on-air. After several rounds of this back and forth, and an anecdote about one or the other brother’s family life, the call ends with a chuckling customer looking at an expensive mechanic’s bill avoided or in their future.
The humility (or lack thereof) displayed in their segment Stump the Chumps when a guest is brought back from a previous episode to say if the advice paid off charmingly closes some memorable vignettes. Car Talk’s hosts delight in learning when they were wrong, or better still when one brother was wrong and the other the provider of sage advice. Until the next segment.
Car Talk might be the perfect show for a roboticist. The hosts knew that the customer was almost never right, but they freely admitted that the hosts were far from perfect too. Through caller after caller, a listener builds a familiarity with how people present their issues. You learn not just diagnoses, but also an engineering empathy to explain how a problem could have happened. You learn an incredibly valuable lesson delivered brilliantly through Bostonian laughter when the hosts rip apart other mechanics in their attempt to fleece unsuspecting callers, but also when the hosts admit that it’s not their money and advise callers into a more modern vehicle.
There’s a sort of forever appeal to listening to three people talk about a brand that hasn’t existed for 36 years. There’s even further brilliance in sustained listening. As the episodes progress and callers’ rustbuckets delivery date move past Knight Rider being relevant to the modern era of ECUs as to approach the complexity of Knight Rider, the duo remain eternal.
The Best of Car Talk is distributed by NPR and is available wherever you get your podcasts. I know that when I make the drive back to Pittsburgh I’ll be laughing and debugging along with Click and Clack.
If you’re still not convinced to add the show to your repertoire, or you’re more of a reader, their Puzzler Archive is listed here and is fantastic. Engineers, science students, and anyone who’s ever had a car that makes a weird kachunk noise but only when taking a left turn with the right blinker on will appreciate a break from whatever they’re doing to puzzle over one.
