(Girl who wrote a letter complaining that the show sucked and that she had to listen because her parents did in the car... they had her on and she'd periodically call in for years)
My all-time favorite was the episode where someone called in and said that their vehicle would run pretty well but with lots of vibration for 8 minutes, then the engine would cut and refuse to start up again. It turned out to be someone onboard the Space Shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8
"The odometer on this thing reads about 60 million miles."
That was John Grunsfeld - he used to work on his car at Hacker's Haven in the late 70's (a DIY garage that Ray and Tom ran in Cambridge for a few years). That's just awesome that he was able to call in from the Space Shuttle.
I really liked their cameo in Cars. Tom's character was a Dodge Dart, which was problematic car he had owned, and was often a point of discussion on the show.
Car Talk was my gateway into NPR growing up when I used to listen with my dad on long drives. I've had the fortune to meet the Car Talk brothers many times and they were just as funny and friendly in person as they were on the show. RIP Tom.
Great line from the "Tom's Marriage Advice" segement: "I have my own law of marriage, which is that it is more important to be happy than to be right."
Car Talk was wonderful when I was listening to NPR. I had to stop listening after their abdication of duties in the 2000 election and the subsequent wars. I now understand NPR to be just a shill for our corporate government. Tom and Ray were great though.
Wow, that clip actually brought me to tears. As obvious as their friendship was on the radio, that clip made it all the more clear just how close they were.
My Dad and I were lamenting this news today. We listened to the show together. And although my Dad spent his career in aircraft maintenance (as an officer in the AF), corporate finance, and now (in semi-retirement) higher education, he is a talented car mechanic who fixed all our cars until I was 5 or 6 and he became too busy at work to do so. He understands cars at an almost intuitive level, and even though I'm a decent mechanic myself, I frequently call him up when I'm wondering what's going on with a car.
And I see several other comments here about people listening to the show together with their fathers, and how their fathers were talented mechanics. It's definitely a generational thing.
So many mechanically-inclined boys who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tom and Ray Magliozzi, were into building and repairing cars, just as many mechanically-inclined boys in the 1970s and 1980s were into building, repairing, and programming computers.
(I do say "boys" because this seems to have been a mostly male gene [correction: gender] phenomenon. Fortunately, I think this may be changing now.)
My Dad gets along well with computers (particularly spreadsheets), but he little understanding of how they work inside.
It makes me wonder if my 4-year-old son or 7-year-old daughter and their friends will be strikingly talented in some new field, like virtual reality or nanotechnology, but will marvel at my knowledge of C and of the inner workings of early computers.
What a thoughtful comment. I don't intend to attack, so please take the following question in good faith: did you mean to say "male gene" or "male gender"?
I'd certainly agree for the former, but I would hope you'd elaborate more if you were to suggest a purely genetic origin.
One of my fondest memories growing up was sitting around the breakfast table with my parents while listening to the puzzler segment of the show, as well as when people would call in to have them diagnose random problems with their cars.
My dad, a decent car mechanic in his own right, would try to guess the cause himself and then we'd wait to hear if he was correct. Given that my dad passed away suddenly one month ago makes the timing of this even sadder for me. Truly the end of an era of my childhood.
I started listening to Car Talk in high school in the 1980s. I loved the wit, the banter with callers, and the weird questions about cars ... which (as others have noted) were often really about people.
Tom and Ray showed the value of personality and wisdom when it comes to mass media programming, especially in an age when so much information is available online. Yes, many of the problems experienced by the callers could have been diagnosed via Google or prowling car forums. But Car Talk was so much more dynamic and effective, as these two knew what questions to ask about the problem, which (often) led to a correct diagnosis.
The calls I particularly enjoyed:
* People calling in from Afghanistan, Alaska or other remote places with edge cases
* People calling in to question their husband's, father-in-law's or neighbor's advice about cars.
* The bizarre cases -- someone who had a plastic bag wrapped around the axle that wouldn't come off, the person with spiders reproducing in the A/C, and the guy whose cassette player not only had an REM tape stuck in it, but the damn thing was stuck on loop and wouldn't turn off while driving.
> People calling in from Afghanistan, Alaska or other remote places with edge cases
If you've never been to Alaska, I highly recommend a trip. It's extremely beautiful and "edge-cases" quickly become a way of life.
I live in the Yukon, and just yesterday I was waist deep in a half-frozen river in the middle of nowhere, smashing out ice with the back of an axe. Once I'd done that enough, I rigged up a pulley on a tree on the far size, ran a cable and my buddy and I pulled each other across on our quads. It was about -15C (5F) the entire time. Today I'm sitting at my desk working as a Software Engineer.
Or the guy that "lost a frozen turkey" in the car before thanksgiving, finding it much later after having not driven, and their advice of just selling the car because no one would never be able to get the smell out..
I also fondly remember then appearance on a Nova science special where they pretended to be water molecules passing through a fuel cell with balloons taped to their bottoms.
RIP. They were so entertaining. I never knew shit about cars but always felt a bit of excitement when I was in the car and heard that we'd be listening to them instead of some of my parents' music.
Also this is pretty great:
> Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Heaven.
Don't care about cars. Care about those devices called "humans". These dudes fixes and tuned the latter while appearing to fix and tune the former. And one will not be the same without the other. So many fond memories...
Looks like I need to expand on that a bit. Nowadays we say "Tech is Hell" but it was even worse back in their day and they had a lot of stories about their experience that, them being them, were both hilarious and awful. I ignored their advice because, hey, don't get a teenage boy to not do something by telling him it's hard.
I loved Click and Clack. Their laughter and enthusiasm was always infectious. No matter how down I was, listening to Car Talk always lifted me up.
Though they were exceedingly smart and good at what they do, their self-deprecating attitude humanized them, and really instilled the lesson of humility.
Well put. Their good natured self deprecation was hilarious but also so sweet. You really felt the bond they had between each other, with their audience, and their love of the show.
This is the one thing I really noticed. After listening to some of the morning shows, where one person is always getting teased and used as a doormat for everybody's jokes.
You could tell these two truly had a special friendship and it clearly came through in how they interacted with each other. There were no malicious stabs or cheap shots, it was all lighthearted fun and jesting.
100% seconded. Tom was truly one of a kind - the infectiousness of their personalities reminded me, in an odd way, of Robin Williams. Tom, Ray, and Robin - they a made the world a better place by being reliably themselves, institutions of my growing up, and hilarious. My deepest condolences to Ray on what must be a terribly sad day for him.
Listening to car talk taught me an enormous amount about how to be an engineer, and it helped teach my wife how to be a doctor. How to formulate hypotheses and ask the right questions to test them, and that no matter how expert you are in your field, you will always encounter some oddball phenomenon that's entirely new to you.
Man, it occurred to me that their show goes all the way back to when I, too, was an actual auto mechanic many years ago. Saturday mornings in the shop, listening to the show while a half dozen professional mechanics tried to diagnose the problem. Once in a while we concluded that those two got it wrong, but right or wrong wasn't the point. They were funny, entertaining, and informative, all in a format that was accessible to those for whom a car is mostly a black box.
RIP, Tom. I wish I were ever as much the complete package when comes to mechanical things as you were.
My kids (7 and 5) and I loved sitting in the car and listening to Car Talk. They didn't have a clue about the content, but just loved listening to the brothers joking and having a good time with each other and the callers. So many Saturdays on the way to this or that, did I get the request to turn on the radio for Car Talk. In all honesty, Car Talk was almost like an audio-only cartoon for them, with those jovial and dynamic voices.
Also, being an incurable VW nut, I often experienced so many of the issues folks called to ask about. I really enjoyed expressing my own opinion out loud and waiting to see what the boys usually said (which was different than what I thought, and often made a lot more sense than my own theories).
R.I.P. Tom. I hope Ray is holding it together today. What a blow.
The fact that this is at the top of HN and has been for hours is phenomenal. Despite the often insular nature of the HN crowd, it's things like this that reveal ta deep respect for the hacker in everyone. Imagine being so badass that you hosted a national tech-support call-in show and solved people's problems random computer problems: "Tom: Sounds like you've got corrupted memory... Ray: Don't listen to him, all his memory's corrupted. [minutes of infectious laughter]"
Agreed. I think it wasn't just his humor and his knowledge, but his approachability and willingness to share. I worked at NPR for 6 years. I never met either of the brothers, but we were all a gog the day Doug the Old Grey Mare came in to talk to pick our brains about web analytics, of all things. Here is this person who I think is an absolute genius, but can listen to us talk about a seemingly banal thing earnestly. They listened, they shared. They cared.
My dad called into car talk once and told them on-air about how I would listen to every episode while driving around in my little tikes car. I didn't understand what they were talking about, but I loved their laughing.
Also, I still can't take the new Fiats on the road seriously.
This is a point that I think a lot of people are missing: Click and Clack, while being funny, were primarily master troubleshooters. They could digest incomplete descriptions of a problem over the phone from a neophite user and in the span of a phone conversation, usually with no ability to run tests, could work out a plausible root cause and a corrective course of action. The "Stump the Chumps" segment would occasionally follow up with some previous victims/callers, and more often than not they had largely gotten it right.
I'm not sure how much you'll actually learn about cars from listening, but if you pay attention you should be able to learn a whole lot about effective troubleshooting.
I'm an Engineer, and I'm constantly shocked how many people don't have basic troubleshooting abilities. I've always considered it a "basic life skill", but experience has shown me that's not true.
My favorite "remote debugging" of all time was the caller who complained about the key in her old Subaru wagon not working sometimes.
After some back and forth, one of the brothers said, "wait, wait--I'll bet you have a huge set of keys, right?" "Well, yes." "So, on that model of Subaru, the weight of the whole key set will eventually wear down the lock and make it stick. I've seen that before."
It's a fairly common problem across several makes of cars. Replaced my ignition switch once because of this, and since then have used a separate clip for my house and work keys.
I've only been aware of car talk for a few years (having moved from the UK) but this is sad. Seemingly every significant road trip I've done has involved laughing my ass off at something in that show, but also being struck by just how wise a lot of their advice sounds (whether it is might be something else). Mere mention of "Manila Folders" or the BMW 9 series manual is enough to reduce my partner and I to hysterics.
This was my experience as well. Inevitably, at some point during every long road trip, there'd be a period where I'd get reception for a while, and I'll be darned if it wasn't Car Talk. After hours and hours alone on the road, it was always warming to have them guffawing about whatever they were rambling about at the time. Brightened every trip.
I'm busy reading his article on Paxos & of course I find this here. Feels like a classic case of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
Regardless, oh my goodness. When you see the solution spit out you just wanna drop your head on the desk. It's that "ahaaa" moment we probably don't feel often enough.
NPR and public radio more generally in the U.S. is such a national treasure, and these guys were one of the brightest gems. I loved seeing their personalities and infectious laugh enshrined with a cameo in Pixar's Cars, which itself captured a sort of best-of or hall-of-fame for American car culture.
I listen to reruns on a regular basis, and what continues to amaze me about the show is their ability to "debug" cars and make it sound fun. They were always helpful, never looking down on the caller or the predicament they found themselves in. Us techies could learn a few things from them.
I'm a car guy through and through, and I started listening to those guys when I barely started turning wrenches on my first car. Great guys, and great show.
My Dad, one of the best mechanics I'll ever know (who has forgotten more than I'll ever learn) used to listen and talk about how accurate they were with their advice and wished more people would listen.
I can report that Tom and Ray did in fact have the occasional cappuccino at Caffe Paradiso in Harvard Square. I had no idea who they were until Tom laughed :-)
A very unique and memorable personality and show, reminds me of when Paul Harvey passed. Some people are capable of making peeling paint sound interesting, it's a unique ability to interest people in something simply by your passion for it.
My first job in college involved helping them build the first Car Talk web site (it was around 1994). All of the graphics were drawn on paper and scanned in, and I spent hours converting their recordings into (IIRC) RealAudio format so people could livestream them. (Downsampling / compression at the time was far from real-time.)
They were both great guys to work with, who seemed genuinely surprised at their own fame and came to everything with genuine humor, warmth and without the slightest hint of ego. Out of all the notable MIT alumni, they're my favorite and I was really happy when they finally got invited to speak at commencement. (I'd also argue that the guys at Top Gear owe them some credit for pioneering a "show about cars" that's really just entertainment.)
It's a terrible loss, but at least Tom will live on for many years in the form of all those recorded hours of (somewhat auto-related) entertainment. The world is a little less happy and funny today without him, though.
SO sad, also one of my favorite memories growing up with my parents driving in the car listening to them. My mom thought they were gods gift of comedy, they were hysterical. I listen to them locally on my NPR affiliate every Saturday at 2-3pm it makes my errand running on Saturday's delightful. He will be missed.
My favorite was the Russian built Skoda. Its main innovation was a heated rear window was so that you could keep your hands warm when you were pushing it after it broke down. It still makes me smile a decade later. Thanks Tom.
I grew up in Cambridge, MA and always got a good laugh walking through Harvard Square and looking up at the sign for the firm of Dewey, Cheatem & How[0]. The third story window is where the Magliozzi brothers had their office. RIP Tom and his amazingly contagious laugh, still makes me smile thinking about it.
I heard on my local NPR station on how the show got its start. A few decades ago a volunteer run radio station (open source radio station ??) in Boston wanted a panel of auto mechanics to answer calls about cars. Six were invited and only one showed up, the one being 1 of the 2 brothers.
Because it was open source radio, the brothers talked as normal, un'photoshopped' people which was why it eventually got the attention later on.
I missed the Alzheimers detail until this post, and realizing how old these dudes were//are.
I still remember them receiving phone calls from the space station ["Well, I've called everyone else, so..."] and from above//below the Arctic circle ["Yea, so, our warmest is about -50 and we have this odd problem..."].
I don't know any one who enjoy their work as much as the Tappet brothers seemed to on their show. I used to listen to them during my commute after a long days work. Your laughter was indeed infectious. RIP Tom.
Aww- my 5 year old twin boys had picked up their "Don't drive like my brother" from listening to their show and the Cars movie- and use it often. So sad they won't get to enjoy them. RIP Tom
Such sad news - I don't normally really take celebrity deaths too personal but I've been listening to these guys since I can remember. So so sad to hear this...
> Tom and Ray haven't done the show live for two years; Car Talk has been airing archives of old shows. Berman says Ray would like to continue doing that, as a tribute to his brother.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but how did the call-ins work then? There was always a message if it was a rerun (don't try really calling, etc.) but even their last shows had what appeared to be live call-ins and a call-in number and I remember them having to advise people to turn the radio off while they're on the phone.
I can't really say much that has not already been said here and I fully second all the comments about their fond memories of the show. Even though I am not into cars, they made what I think is sort of a mundane topic (car repair) into something completely entertaining and hilarious. I loved their brain teasers, so clever. I will miss that laugh.
I didn't listen to this show often but when I did I always enjoyed it. Especially when there was a call about a woman's heater smelling like bacon and the hosts decided (after having no idea how to fix it) that it was not actually a problem and she should consider it a perk.
Every Saturday, I would step out to do grocery at 10:00am and tune into 88.5FM KQED which would be playing 'Car Talk'. I instantly warmed to the humor and banter the hosts expressed. They were top notch diagnostics as well. No doubt about it, Tom will be deeply missed. RIP.
I hadn't known the show was on reruns, that's how good the show was/is. I recently started listening within the past year. However admittedly, I am an off and on listener. Tom was filled with life, such a sad loss!
> Tom and Ray haven't done the show live for two years; Car Talk has been airing archives of old shows. Berman says Ray would like to continue doing that, as a tribute to his brother.
Soo… Apparently the show as you all have known it for the last two years will be unaffected. Alternately, the show died two years ago and you never noticed.
EDIT: I thought that this news meant the show was ending and was surprised to read that actually the show would not change. So I thought I’d highlight this fact that the show would not change. There was no offense intended.
"The show's been off the air for a while, so his death shouldn't bother you".
That's how this comes off. By the way, many people are completely aware that they've been off the air, and still find this saddening. In your attempt to be clever or somehow revealing a secret, you've come off as arrogant and insensitive.
(Please don’t invent quotes and write them as a separate paragraph – it looks as though I wrote the inflammatory text, when in fact I meant nothing of the kind.)
I thought that this news meant the show was ending and was surprised to read that actually the show would not change. So I thought I’d highlight this fact.
As the target of misunderstandings at times, I get it, and your meta-point is taken. My previous statement about the perceived insensitivity to the actual story, Tom's death, stands.
>Soo… Apparently the show as you all have known it for the last two years will be unaffected. Alternately, the show died two years ago and you never noticed.
>There was no offense intended.
The use of ellipses for dramatic silence , elongated words, and the personal targeting of your statements ("YOU all have known..." "YOU never noticed") indicate that "There was no offense intended." was really just a statement made for the sake of indemnifying yourself from the backlash of impersonal comments made about the death of another human, rather than a statement of ignorance and apology.
I don't honestly believe you when you say that you felt this thread was about the radio show going off the air rather than subject/topic line itself (the death of a person). I think that's an excuse to make your actions appear more excusable.
I have never actually heard the show, so yes, I did actually think that at least half the focus was that the show would end – the show’s name is also in the title. Furthermore, since I never listened to the show, I excluded myself by writing “you” instead of “us”.
If I were to analyze your statements as you did mine, I might come to the conclusion that you are merely lashing out at anyone who seem to be insensitive to your loss. But I shouldn’t do that, as ascribing motives to you would demean this conversation. It’s better to keep things civil and polite.
I made some statements about the status of the show – nothing about the person, mind you – and they were misinterpreted as insensitive to the person. I made clarifications, but now you won’t believe me. I really don’t see what else I can do, now.
I will certainly refrain from commenting in mortuary articles from now on – there appears to often be too much grief for actual civilized discourse.
> Soo… Apparently the show as you all have known it for the last two years will be unaffected. Alternately, the show died two years ago and you never noticed.
You really sound like you're an asshole. Maybe you didn't intend that, but you do.
>So I thought I’d highlight this fact that nothing substantial would change.
Nothing substantial, aside from the fact that world has lost one of smartest, funniest, and most humble people ever to provide untold hours of entertainment on the radio...
The show has been playing reruns for a couple years now (I thought this was common knowledge?), but Tom's passing is indeed a sad day. He was absolutely someone who embodied the hacker ethic.
(Girl who wrote a letter complaining that the show sucked and that she had to listen because her parents did in the car... they had her on and she'd periodically call in for years)
My all-time favorite was the episode where someone called in and said that their vehicle would run pretty well but with lots of vibration for 8 minutes, then the engine would cut and refuse to start up again. It turned out to be someone onboard the Space Shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8