The Best of Car Talk - #2643: Breaking-in the Brakes

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

Colleen’s 85-yr-old dad was told by his mechanic that to properly ‘break-in his brakes’ he should be varying his speed between 30-50mph and applying the brakes periodically for several days of driving. So dad has been dutifully out on the local freeway causing mayhem by applying the brakes willy nilly and going well under the speed limit. Is dad’s mechanic correct -and is it time to plan dear old dad’s final services? Find out on this episode of the Best of Car Talk. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hello and welcome to Car Talk from National Public Radio with us, Click and Clack the Tapper Brothers, and we're broadcasting this week from the murky gender research department. Oh, I thought it was the murky gender. The murky gender research department here at Caratuck Plaza. A very interesting issue was raised this week in a letter that we received from someone named Amy Doyle. And you know that I'm very interested in gender. It's one of my favorite subjects.

But here's the deal. Dear Tom and Ray, I recently helped my son buy his first car, a beautiful 1991 Toyota Camry. Lately it seems I can't go anywhere without seeing these cars, so I thought that was a pretty good selling point. Anyway, when I told a guy I work with, what car my son bought, he nodded knowingly and said, Great car, but it's a girl car. I know men are much more hung up on these things than women are, not just with their cars, but in everything they do, say, you name it. It's these ill-defined yet well-understood principles that keep my husband from ever wearing pink clothes or pleaded dockers from ever going to the mall alone with another guy.

They can go to a bar alone, but not a restaurant. And God forbid a guy should drive a girl car. So, I ask you, since my son has obviously flubbed that one, what are the criteria by which one can distinguish a girl car? And while we're on the subject, what other things should my son know about this stuff. Okay. Now, we have discussed this at Great Lent here at Carthock Plaza.

We have. We have. Oh, we have. I think we sent you an email about it. You haven't gotten to that email yet. Have you learned how to delete the emails at least?

Oh, I'm good at delete. Because you must have five or six thousand. Oh, no, I'm going to delete it. Here's the, I mean, we had a similar situation with a friend of ours. Our friend, Tony,

has a son named Jonathan, and they were going to buy, What was it? A golf. A golf. With the four-cylinder turbo. Yeah. Very nice car.

And he's all set to go, and he is ready to buy it, and someone mentions to him at school, wherever he goes to school, that two-bit school out west there. UCLA. I don't know. I don't know where it is. His cousin says... Oh, his cousin. He says, you can't buy that car. That's a chick car.

And my son recently was looking at cars, and I recommend. to him a Passat. He said, Oh, chick car. So, our question is, I mean, Amy wants to know, and we want to know, too. What cars are chick cars, and

what cars are guy cars? We just need nominations. I think that a Toyota Camry is a chick car. We're going to, and we just need you to write to us, either by, how do they write to us? Well, you have an address, right? You can write to Car Talk Plaza,

box 3,500, Harvard Square, Cambridge. Yeah. Our Fair City. Mast 02238. Yeah. You know, and indicate on the envelope that it's not a puzzler submission. You can say this is a chick car, guy car survey. Yeah.

Or email us from the car talk section of cars.com. This is a very, very interesting issue. How come some people know and some people don't? I mean, is there something that, some divine intervention? you get a voice saying, that's a chick car. Well, I don't, well, Hey, jerk.

Feel free to include that and in any information you send us. Yeah, I mean, I always hear voices saying, hey, jerk. That's your wife. It's usually the person walking next to me on the sidewalk. If you want to call us about the gender of your car or how anyone would arrive at the gender of your car or about its inner workings, you can call us at 888 Car Talk.

That's 888. 227, 8255, a lawyer on car talk. Hi, this is Sharon from Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, Sharon. We haven't had a call from Texas for a long time. Oh, well, I've used to live up there. Well, we don't tell anyone. Okay.

So what's going on? Well, I have a 94 Mazda B-3,000 pickup. Yeah. That we just replaced all the clutch mechanism to, the clutch, the throwout bearing, and the pressure plate, because I couldn't shift. Okay. So I drove it for a couple weeks,

and all of a sudden I could. I couldn't shift again. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I burned this thing up in two weeks. And my husband said, no, don't worry about it. It's the hydraulic clutch fluid cylinder, the reservoir, okay? Yes. And it was dry. So I put the brake fluid in, that's what you use, dot three, and pumped it up.

And now it's driving okay, but it still is leaking out. So I called a Mazda dealer, the service department at Bacta. And he said, actually, you have two of those. There's an upper one and a lower one. one and a lower one. No, there's a slave cylinder and a master cylinder. Okay. We don't like that terminology, but that's what it is.

It's politically incorrect. There's a predominant and a subservient. Okay. So one of those is leaking. I think the bottom one is leaking. So my question is, can I just go ahead and keep driving and just keep filling it up, and it won't hurt it if it just keeps leaking out as long as I keep... No, but eventually it'll start leaking out so fast that you'll have to have your arm

the window with the can. Okay. You know, I mean, that's a drag. Yeah. And I guess the other question that comes to mind is, is it doing now what it did before you spent the $500 for the clutch? Well, it was $200 because they put it in. Yes, it is.

And I've been thinking that, going, well, but it was worn. He looked at the parts when they took him out, and it was my husband and my brother-in-law that did it. Oh, those knuckleheads. So they did this in the driveway. So you couldn't shift, and they said, well, she needs a clutch. Well, he drove it. He drove it, too.

And what was happening when you say you couldn't shift? If you put your foot, the engine's running. You put your foot on the clutch. And it wouldn't grind. And it wouldn't go out of neutral in any direction. Yeah, I know. Just grind. You needed a clutch master cylinder.

That's what, yeah. And you still need one. I still need one. Let's not. Wait, let's not. Let's not. I mean, those guys spent a good weekend. A day and a half.

And they probably smashed their fingers. They got all kinds of injuries, exactly. They probably ruined $300 worth of clothes. A small fire. They probably had a small fire. They had to go out and buy at least $1,000 worth of equipment. And tools. No, they did have the tools.

So we're not even going to suggest that what they did was unnecessary. We're just going to say that you do need a slave cylinder, just like you did. And a master cylinder, too, perhaps. Probably both of them. Oh, yeah, I would do both. Do both. Why not? And they should, never mind.

Never mind. See you, Sharon. Okay. Bye. Bye, bye. Thank you. 1-888-car talk. That's 8882-2-7.

Hey, you want a new way to give the number? Yeah. 8255. Do you click a clock? I noticed Tommy's been playing with various ways to state your phone number, not me. It's Ramey has been playing with various ways stating the phone. Perhaps you've already thought of this one. Roman numerals.

I can only find Roman numerals up through a thousand so I have to segment your number the way the phone company does it rather than write one 11-digit number. Okay, and here it is. I'm writing this down here. That's one, right? D-C-C-C, right? L-X-X-X-V-I-I-I-C-C-X-X-V-I-I-C-C-X-V-I.

C-C-C-X-V-I. M, M, M. Yeah, I don't. That's just the area code. Okay. Well, that's why that civilization crumbled. Their numbering system. Yeah.

Hello, you're on Car Talk. Hi there. This is Peter from Boston. Boston? Boston Mass. Actually, Dorchester. Dorch. What part of Dorch?

Do you know Dorchester? Fields Corner. You're classic, then. I'm... I'm a lower mills. Lower Mills, not far away. No. Not far away.

Very good. Yeah. So what's up? Well, I'm calling because I have a 1994 explorer, Fort Explorer, that is doing some pretty crazy stuff. It is doing any backflips or anything. No. Blue smoke is kind of puffing out of my car when I started. I've been putting transmission fluid in it because it seemed like it was slip.

a little bit and I couldn't see any leaks or anything but the strange thing is that I noticed that my oil was getting higher and higher and higher and I know it sounds totally crazy but when I changed my oil it completely overflowed you know like there was 10 quartz in there yeah because you were adding the transmission fluid to the oil to the engine oil it seems like it but somebody told me that was totally impossible no oh you kidding me we do it all the time you do it wait how did how did you add that where did you add the transmission fluid. Well, I didn't put it in the

crank case. I don't, maybe you did. Maybe you did. You wouldn't be the first one that's done it. No, I put the tranny where the tranny floor goes, you know, and the oil in the crank case. You pulled out the dipstick for the tranny. Yep. Okay. And you put a funnel in there.

Yep. Yeah. Okay. This is good. This could be, this could be good. I put a lot of transmission fluid in this car to disappear. I mean, if you put a lot of transmission floor it in, you don't have a leak, and there's no way really for the transmission to burn it. So if it ain't leaking out and you're adding more,

but the level isn't going up, but the oil level's going up. I have a solution. I have an answer to it. Yeah? Yeah. Go ahead. You're ready for this?

Yeah. You've got two problems, man. The transmission cooler line is leaking into... Oh, no, you... Don't stick with me on this! No, no, don't even go there. Don't even go there. It's leaking into the radiator.

Yeah. And he's got a cracked block. Oh, he might as well. He must have a... Peter, fall on your sword, man. Life is, you know, it is over. Actually, I can tell you that I did just notice something. So you might, you know, I think you might be close here,

although somebody told me this wasn't the case. I looked in the radiator overflow. And it's red. And it was all brown. And I said, that's it. It's coming in my radio, and some mechanics said, No, no, that's rust. Well, it could be rust.

But it could be that the orange ethylene glycol and the red transmission fluid have turned, the leaves have turned to brown. Oh, I don't like it. I mean, I don't like it. I don't like it. See, let me go back and ask you another question. You say you add transmission fluid to this thing all the time. Do you ever add engine oil? Oh, yeah.

Well, I changed the oil. But no, but between changes. No. But you say it's blowing smoke out the back. You do blue smoke out the tailpipe? Well, it does it two times. One, when you start it, you get a puff of smoke. And when you accelerate it?

If you happen to accelerate it rapidly. Right. I have stopped traffic with this car. You have like $128,000 miles on this thing? About. Yeah, $130. Yeah, well, I think you need a ring job. Number one.

And I think a couple of times when you weren't thinking right, Peter. No. You put that funnel in the... No way. Come on. Peter has been putting automatic transmission fluid in vehicles for 20 years. Exactly. He knows where to put it.

No. Pete. Pete. Pete. Pete. We'll be, we'll give us your address. Are you in law mills right now? I am.

Can you drive over here? Can you be here in half an hour? Can you be here in half an hour? Ten minutes. Yeah, we want to see this. We want to see this hole that you're putting the transmission oil in. And you're going to say, oh, what a joke I am. Well, so is this a new radiator or is this like ripping the engine apart?

Well, if my brother has a remote chance of being right, you need to have someone do a head gasket test. When that test comes out negative, then you've got to go back to square one. But my feeling is occasionally you've put it in the wrong thing, and especially if you're not adding oil to it, the oil level goes up and up and up. You called Exxon, they may want to talk to you. Or call OPEC. They might want to talk to you, too. I don't know, Peter. Peter, drive over here. I want to look.

All right, we'll talk. See you. Thank you. I mean, it isn't often that we can say drive over here. It's only fair that we should have them come over here because... The offer's open to anyone. It's open to anyone. Calling from Cincinnati? Drive over. Okay, it seems you need a little time out right now.

What do you think... Is this so I can think about all the wrong answers that I've come up with today? Well, not really. We only have a minute. We'll be right back. Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us. Click and Clack the Tapit Brubbrose. and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and the answer to last week's puzzler. And this one was from the baseball algebraic series.

There aren't many of those. No. No, this is the only one. A series of one. Here it is. There are two rookie players, and we call them Pluto and Popeye. On opening day, they made a wager on who would have the best batting average at the end of the season. So here it is.

It's the last game of the season, and nothing's going to change because neither of these guys is in the starting lineup. Pluto says, hey, Popeye, what did you bat for the first half of the season? Popeye says, I am what I am, and it's all that I am, and I bet it at 250. Pluto says, I got you there, I batted 300. Then Bluto asks, how about after the All-Star break? And Popeye proudly pipes up, I batted $3.75. Bluto says, pretty good. You know what, I batted?

$400. Fork over that $20 that we bet. And I believe you also said that they had the same number of at-bats. I did. It was then that Dougie the Bat Boy saunter's over and says, don't pay the 20 bucks. I think you won. Huh?

How could that be? And how many times did they hit him with the bat? Well, here it is. Go ahead, man. I can hardly wait. Let's assume that they both had 600 at-bats. Is that a lot? No, it's about average for a guy who plays the whole season except for the last game.

Okay, it's 600 at bats. If Bluto batted 300 for the first half of the season, and he had 500 at bats during that first half of the season. Ooh. He had got 150 hits. 150 over 500 is 300 average, right? You've got 150. Yeah. Okay.

If Popeye batted 250, it had 100 at bats, he would have had 25 for 100. Uh-huh. Okay. You with me so far? I'm with you. Second half of the season, Blu-Dats first. 400. How does he do that? Well, we know he had 500 bats in the first half. He's only been up 100 times in the second half of the season. And he's got 40 hits. And he got 40 hits. Poppie

bat's 375. He's up 500 times. And he gets 187 and a half hits. One of them was a check swing single over the infield. They don't count that half a hit. Yeah. So now let's figure it all out. So we got Bluto batted 600 times. How many total hits did he get? 190, I have. Right. How about Popeye? How many hits did he get? Uh, two hundred and twelve. Two hundred twelve and a half. And a half. And when you figure that out, Bluto batted three sixteen for the season.

Yeah. Right? Even though he batted three hundred and four hundred in each half. Yeah. And Popeye bats three 53. And when's the batting title? No kidding. Pretty good, huh?

Pretty darn good. A good little example of the arithmetic mean. And how statistics can lie. More importantly. Wow. That's good. Now, you know that every fifth grade teacher in the country will be using this problem next week. I hope so.

I hope so. Because it's a good one. And what they should do is take bets. Teach the kids about betting. Right. And they should give odds. Teach the kid about odds. That's good.

They can cover all the bases, so to speak. So who's our winner? The winner is Mike Bennett from Dallas, Texas. And for having him. his answer selected at random from among all the correct answers, Mike is going to get a $25 gift certificate to the store at the Cart Talk section of Cars.com. And with that $25 gift certificate, he can get a Car Talk disappearing hairline cover-up kit, also known as the embroidered Card Talk Baseball Cat.

And by the way, if you'd like information on any of the taste optional items, we occasionally mention on the show, you can always visit the store at the Cart Talk section of Cars.com yourself. or you can call 888 car junk. Yeah. Wow. Anyway, we'll have a new... I want to describe this puzzle from the home appliance realm. Oh, the home appliance algebraic series.

Yeah. That puzzle will be coming up in the third half of today's show. So keep listening because it's a long ways off. Hey, do you know what time it is? Time to set up a quickie wedding chapel, the oil change bay? No, no, no, but I do like the idea. It's time to play Stump the Chumps! This is the part of the show

when we bring back a caller from a previous show to see if our advice was, as we say, all-star quality. I thought you'd say this as we'd call it back from the dead. Or if our performance was double-A Trenton. So who's our lucky player this week? The lucky player is Bill Lee, the one-and-only, Space Man. Excellent. Bill Lee was a star pitcher for the Red Sox in the 1970s.

Yeah, he's still a little. a big star. He told us he was recently named Best Ball Player over 50 on the planet. But he didn't say which planet, did he? No. Well, our buddy, Bill, is living in northern Vermont somewhere. He's still driving an old beat-up 74 BMW, which was part of

the trade that brought him to Montreal, I think, and something like that. I figured who we got, but they got Bill Lee a 74, 2002, and a couple of snow tires to be named later. Anyway, Bill Lee called us to say the car ran fine when it was freezing a hot out, but it wouldn't

start in between. We interrogated it with our usual penetrating line. Indeed. Of questions. And then it'll run really rough, and then it'll come, idle, die, and then it won't start again. And I'm wondering if it's the rotor, because I'm going through rotor caps real quick. You are? What happens to them?

The contacts get all black? Yes. Mm. Mm. And that happens within like 5,000 miles? Yes. Why do I ask him those questions? Never ask a question that you don't know the answer to me.

My lawyer, Cald. So what do we finally decide was wrong? I thought it was the Weber's. I thought it was the carburetors, and for once you agreed with it, you suggested the temperature compensator in the Weber carburetors, and we hemmed and hard, and we told him, the problem is in the Weber carburetors, Bill. I think you led me astray, so let's find out how we did. Bill Lee, are you there?

Yes, I am. And I'm at my lawyer's office right now. Look, before we find out if we threw one over the backstop here, we need to make sure that the answer you're about to give has not been influenced by, of course, our staff, the staff of National Public Radio, or any of the multitude of attorneys for George Steinbrenner. Well, it definitely isn't.

And, boys, I want to tell you, I've listened to your show a lot, and maybe with a win here, you guys can hit over 200 over the Mendoza line. Well, was it the copy? It was the carburetors or not? It was the carburetor. Oh, my gosh!

So what did you do, what did you do, man? They were totally out of sink. I went to one garage. They said I had no compression. They were terrible, and they had no compression because there was so much gasoline floating around in there. Washing down the cylinders. Exactly.

I ended up taking it to the Greensboro garage, and they had worked on it back in the early 80s. No. Which is the last time it was worked on. No, the last time it was worked on. Because I go to Canada, you know, when I got traded for Stan Pappy, I actually did get the BMW, and I went across the border with it. Stan Pappy? I know.

Who the hell is? Well, that's what they're saying in Montreal. Who the hell is Bill Lee? But at least when you were in Montreal, you could get all the Cuban cigars that you wanted. And I just gave a couple to my lawyer for payment. It's actually working very good. But right now, the poor babies in the middle of a custody battle. So, we'll stay away from that.

We have our own troubled, thanks. Neither one of you wants it. No. No, no. It's actually, it's a fine vehicle, and it still runs, but the irony of the whole situation is that her lawyer drives a 73 BMW 2002 T.I. Oh. That is a twist of fate, isn't it? I'm telling you, this life is a twist of fate, and the funny thing is, I said, well, I'll race you for it.

No that you have the carburet is fixed You may be able to win I will definitely win Well if we come up to Vermont I'll hit some fungos to you Bill Hey you guys come up and go to the Greensboro garage And I guarantee you They would love to see

Guarantee that we'll find your car there Hey thanks for playing stump the chumps You bet boy Bill Lee One of the greatest baseball players ever Indeed Or was it football Okay Tommy it's time for us to take a break

Another break I don't need no stinking break Not for you for the listeners. Have a little mercy, will you? Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us. Hey, you may be back. I ain't back. With us, click and clack with Tappert Brothers, and we're here to discuss cars, car repair, and of the new puzzler from the wonderful world of home appliances.

The home appliance slash algebraic. Well, this isn't really a home appliance thing. This is a real life thing that happened to me. Yeah. And it took me a while to figure it out, and I hope it takes our listeners even longer. Some weeks ago, I was convinced by my younger son that we needed a new CD player for our sound system. The one we had, according to him, wasn't good enough. So we go out to the local store that sells these things and we buy a replacement for the perfectly good one we had. Can I have the old one? I'm getting to that. So we buy this thing, which takes three CDs instead of the one that, you know, so you can blow three in and it has a remote control and all that.

So we install the thing and of course it works beautifully and I'm about to call my brother an offer for sale to him. For sale? The old one for a mere three or four hundred. I don't know what they. I should mention that all the electronics that I have are hand me down from my brother. Well, I decided to break the mold and sell them to you. And then I had a brainstorm. I said, wait a minute.

In my kitchen, I have one of these fancy. radios. A Bose wave radio. But I was too cheap to get the CD player. But now I have a CD player and a Bose radio and I had the patch chords. So I figure I'll just take the thing from the living room and put it in the kitchen. And did your wife say patches? We don't need no stinking patches. So I do that. Yeah. And I plug the thing in and I put my favorite CD in the thing and I... Go ahead and Lightfoot. No. My current favorite. Jimmy Buffet. CD. Don Williams.

No. I don't remember the name of the artist, but the song is Iko, Iko. I go. Yes. And I put the thing in and I crank the volume up. And much to my disappointment, the thing is skipping all over the place. And, of course, it took 25 minutes to play the song because it kept skipping going back to the beginning. So I said, oh, bummer, there must be something wrong with that CD. Well, your son told you it was no good. So I throw another CD in the thing and it plays perfectly. Now I'm convinced that there's something wrong with my Iko Ico CD. So I go ahead and I put it into the new CD player. It's perfect. I say, hmm, nothing wrong with that. And then I did, I performed a couple of adjustments on the old CD player. I dropped it a couple of times. The time audit method, you bang it,

you drop it, you kick it, you take the plug out, you put them back in. And I do that. And I, again, I put my Iko Ico CD in. And it's skill. all over the place, and then I put my Tish Inohosa in, and it's perfect. And I said, there's got to be something wrong with this CD, but there isn't anything wrong with it. There's got to be something wrong with my CD player, but there isn't anything wrong with it. And I said, how could moving the thing 50 feet from the living room to the kitchen possibly have disturbed this thing and made it malfunction? And the answer is, it did.

But not in the way you think. Oh, that's a hint, isn't it? Yeah. Not in the way that you think. And all the information is there. And then some. And that you need, and then a lot more that you really didn't need to know at all. We knew that.

Yeah. Wow. Now, if you think you know the answer, write it on a postcard or programming into a special edition Palm Pilot 7. with an 8-Magabite memory, anodized aluminum body and a 200 megahertz processor. And send it to Puzzler Tower, Car Talk Plaza,

Box 3,500, Harvard Square, Cambridge. Our Fair City. Matt 22238. Or, of course, you can email your answer from the Car Talk section of Cars.com. 1-888-Cart Talk. That's the number to call. That's 888-227-8-25.

A lawyer on Car Talk. Hi, this is Colleen. I'm calling from Lombard, Illinois. Colleen. Lombard, Illinois. Lillac capital of the world. Oh, really? No kidding. Well, maybe not of the world. For two weeks of the year. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, lilacs are great, but... They're kind of short-lived. I mean, two weeks, come on.

Unfortunately, almost every year, we have a lilac festival, we have a parade and everything, and the last few years have died before the... Well, I know that we have them in our yard, and usually you have to dig them out of the snow to see them, because it's the snow on the ground. That's a bad thing. Anyway, Colleen, what can we do? Well, here's, I don't know what you can do. I'm not really sure if this question is about my dad's car.

What about my dad? Oh. So here's the deal. I called the other day, and I say, listen, you guys want to go to the show? And I was going to take him to see Space Cowboys. He's 80. My mom, 75. He loves Space.

He'll have a good time. He said, yeah, that's fine, but I have to drive. And I said, well, why is that? And he says, well, because I just got a new pair of brakes. And I said, well, why? What does that have to do with anything? And he said, well, for the first 500 miles, I'm the only person that can drive the car, number one. He tells me this.

I said, well, who told you that? Well, my mechanic told me that. I said, well, what's the other reason? He said, well, you have to vary your speed for the first 500 miles from between 35 miles an hour, 50, 45, 45, whatever. And I said, what says who? He says, my mechanic. And I said, Dad, where are you driving like this? He says on 59, which is right outside of his house.

It's 50 miles an hour there. And so he's going 35, 50, 40, 30. On 50. So I'm like, Dad, one of two things is going to happen. A, you're going to get killed or you're going to kill somebody else. Someone's going to kill you. That was option to be at the very least. You're going to really honk off a lot of people.

Plus, I don't believe that that's true. Who's his mechanic? Yeah, I think maybe he was just trying to get him to leave the shop. So he said, you know, my dad's trying to talk him into it. So basically, I should drive the car only, right? The guy's going, yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. I don't know.

We frequently do that with my brother. Okay, so the issues are, A, if you get new brakes, should one person only drive the car. Yeah, and it's a 98 Chevy Lumina in case you care. It doesn't matter. We knew that. Okay. B, do you have to vary the speed that you drive at if you get new brakes? And see, how are we going to break this to dad?

Well, to be fair to dad and his mechanic, modern brakes do require a break-in, break, period. Okay, but that's usually accomplished by the guy who put the brakes in. And frequently, we will put new brakes on a car, and we'll take it out. And the first few stops are not very good. and the brakes do require a wearing in period because these new fangled metallic brakes do require that they seat into the disc rotors, especially if the rotors have been machined. They have to kind of find a home. And the braking effectiveness is improved as the brakes wear in. But this happens very fast.

And first of all, to describe it in terms of miles doesn't make any sense because what if he get into his car and drove 500 miles without stopping? Yeah. And usually this breaking period is accomplished. Will we take a car out? By the time we've test driven it for 10 or 15 minutes, the brakes are sufficiently broken in. And if they haven't, then there's something wrong. You know, so the idea that 500 miles and one driver has to do it is insane, I think, Colleen, he doesn't like the way you drive. No, actually, he told me it would be fine after the 500 miles. I don't think so.

There'll be another excuse. I mean, don't forget, you could have driven over there and taken them in your car. No, I have a pickup. So it's an extended pickup, but it will only fit two people comfortably. Do they are the ones who suggested the pickup? No. Because that would preclude your driving, wouldn't it? It would.

Yeah, I think that it goes, I don't think, I think Dad made the whole thing up. You think it goes deeper than that? I think it goes real deep, and you drive Stinko. And they want to keep you away from the car when they're in it at least. And they're in it, right. In any event, if you went to the movie that night, then the brakes are already broken in. Yeah, well, we didn't. So I'm waiting for the breaking period so I can drive.

Oh, what are you going to see? Space Cowboys? It'll be in video by the time you guys get to see it. All right, Colleen, thanks for calling. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, 18, 8, 8. It's got to be her driving. Yeah, oh, yeah, she's going to be a wacko. Like Lucille, our sister Lucille, whenever someone has to go someplace, we'll see it.

I'll drive, oh, no. No, that's all right. Even though she's got the only car that carries a lot of people, we went out and bought a little bus, just so she wouldn't say, well, everyone will fit in my car. We say, I don't know, we'll be much more comfortable in the school bus. Well, it's happened again. You've misallocated another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk. I like that.

I like it. Our esteemed producer is Doug the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion, punk and lips Berman. Our associate producers are Louis Cronin, the Barbarian, and David, all offers considered green. Doesn't sold this yet, huh? Our engineer is Tad Shrimp Curry. Our senior web lackey is Doug the old gray mayor, and our team. technical, spiritual, and menu advisor, just back from his record-breaking

Walk for Hunger, W-O-K, at the greater random stir fry is John Bugsy Lawler. Our public opinion pollster is Paul Murky of Merkey Research, assisted by statistician Marge and Overa. Our customer care representative is Haywood Jabuzov. Our director of new product repair

is Warren T. My Foot. Our shop is Luke Busy. Our new truck reviewer is a big new rig. And our director of Firestone Tire recalls is Ivana Michelin. Our pseudonym consultant is Norm Diplum. Our divorce attorney is Carmine, not yours. Our bungee jumping instructor is Hugo first.

The Carthog travel agent is lowest fare available. Our Russian chauffeur is pick off and drop off. The banker at Car Talk Plaza poker games is Nikolai Putin. And our seat cushion tester, of course, is Mike Easter. Our chief counsel from the law firm of Dewey Cheever and Howe is U. Louis Dewey.

Known to the out-of-work physicist in Harvard Square. Has Ui-Louis-Louis. Thanks so much for listening. We're click and clack to Tappert Brothers and whatever. You do. Don't drive like my brother. And I have some advice. Don't drive like my brother. We'll be back next week. Bye-bye.

Car Talk is a production of Dewee Cheatham and Howe and WBUR in Boston. And even though the Dalai Lama says you see, life is suffering, whenever he hears us say, this is NPR National Public Radio.