Each week, millions of radio listeners tune into National Public Radio’s Car Talk. A high point of every show is the call-in segment, when listeners phone in for advice and regale hosts Click and Clack with tales of their own automotive misadventures.

Like Dave from Bemidji, Minnesota, who drives his Chevy Cavalier home from Alaska when it already has 350,000 miles on the odometer. And Dinesh, who strolls across Death Valley. Rather than worry about buzzards, he’s concerned about how his car will hold up in the heat.

Christy wants to know if she fried her dad’s Citation. Adrienne frets that a load of rocks might crush her Saab. Single guy John wonders if he should tidy up his car for a first date or reveal its trashy self. And when Ann’s husband travels from Georgia to Florida to get his vasectomy reversed, Ann drives like a banshee to bring him back home. Ever since, their Caravan makes strange grinding noises.

It seems that lunatics aren’t confined to Car Talk Plaza. They’re everywhere, and they’re dialing the phone. Four hilarious radio shows celebrate the land of the free, home of the wacko.

Original radio broadcast     3.5 hrs on 4 CDs
978-1-59887-589-8 (CD) Car Talk Field Guide to the North American Wacko by Tom and Ray Magliozzi
 

TOM AND RAY MAGLIOZZI, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, host National Public Radio’s Car Talk, a weekly call-in program. Their wacky, uninhibited, thoroughly unrehearsed show has endeared them to millions of listeners. Winners of the Peabody Award in broadcasting, the brothers have been handing out advice on everything from car repair to marriage repair since 1977. Their twice-weekly newspaper column, “Click and Clack Talk Cars,” appears in more than 200 newspapers around the country.