The Best of Car Talk - #2666: The Spidermobile

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Heather’s Honda got stolen and shortly after it’s recovery she noticed that the car was infested with dozens of black widow spiders. Ugh! While you’re trying hard not to imagine the little critters crawling up YOUR pantleg while you drive, check out Click and Clack’s arachnophobic responses on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. Car Talk's perks include full archive access, new call-in bonus episodes with Ray, and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.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 to Tapper Brothers, and we're broadcasting this week from the law offices of Dewey, Cheatham, and How. Wow, Zee. So we, I don't think we've ever done that before. No. Wow. Is that where we are? Now, these are supposedly true statements as taken down by court reporters,

and they're from a book called Disorder in the Court. And I believe that these all happen. Here they are. You've probably done something, right? Question. What is the date of your birth? Answer, July 15th. Question, what year? Answer. Every year. Question. What gear were you in at the moment of the impact? Answer. Gucci sweats and rebarks. Question. Now, doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?

the youngest son, the 20-year-old. How old is he? Question. How is your first marriage terminated? Answer, by death. Question. And by whose death was it? Question.

Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney? Answer. No, this is how I always dress when I go to work. It's my very favorite. I mean, at some point you get exasperated.

Question, doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse? Answer, no. Did you check for blood pressure? No. Did you check for breathing? No. So then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy. No.

How can you be so sure, doctor? Because his brain was sitting on my dad. desk and a job. Question. But could the patient still have been alive, nevertheless? Answer. Yes, it's possible he could have been alive in practicing law somewhere.

You can just see the doctor, say, come on. He deserved that. Well, look, if you think those questions and answers are lame, stick around, you ain't seen nothing yet. If you've got a question about your car, give us a call. We should try.

Maybe where you already do this. I was going to say we should try giving the most ridiculous answer. We're pretty much done with that. No, it's 888. Car Talk. It's 8882-27825. A lawyer on Car Talk. Hi. Hello.

My name's Ray. I'm from Utah. Hey, Ray, what's happening? Nice name. It is. Well, let me tell you, I've got a Chevy, a 94 Chevy Luminum minivan. And about the middle of January, it started making the strange noise when I turned the fan on, and weather, now, of course, we're into air conditioning weather,

but either way it doesn't matter. Oh, sure, rub it in, now we're in air conditioning weather. Sure. We're still wearing our Bronco-Nerg-Norke long underwear, and you guys have your air conditioner on, okay. Southern Utah does have its advantage. See if you get a right answer. Doug Mayer, our senior Webblucky,

measured the snow at his front lawn the other day. He lives in New Hampshire. He's got four feet of snow on the ground. More, five feet. Six feet, he says. Six feet. He lies. It gets a foot deeper every day.

Well, I'm originally from North Dakota, so I can appreciate you. You can appreciate Utah, that's for sure. Okay, so you turn on the heater or air conditioner. I turn on the heater, air conditioner, and as long as I have the fan setting on low, it's not a problem. But the minute I turn it up to any speed over at low, I get this nasty kind of sound going on. The air is still coming out. It comes out faster, but it's this horrendous noise. When it first started, it sounded actually like somebody stuck a chicken bone in a phone.

fan and they're just bouncing around. Yeah, I didn't have a problem with all of this. Just the noise. Well, it may have been, in fact, that you had the equivalent of a chicken bone in there at one point, and you may have broken off one of the veins on the fan. Okay. The fan is, it's a squirrel cage kind of fan. It's a cylindrical thing.

All right. And it has a bunch of blades around the circumference of it. And if something bent or broke one of those, then it would throw the thing out of balance, and it would eventually ruin the bearings in the motor. Or even if the thing were in perfect balance, it's possible after seven years that the motor bearings are just worn out so that when it turns at high speed,

you hear the bearings what remains of them getting ground up even more, and you get a wobbling, vibrating kind of sound, and it's only a matter of days before this thing comes flying through the hood. Oh, boy, okay. Now, I don't know how easy. Some cars have... Some cars, manufacturers,

watch your language now. Make it a nightmare to replace what's called the blower motor, which is what you have to do. Right. Some cars make it so easy as to be laughable. Yeah. I don't know how difficult the lumenor replacement is. Okay.

But it's either 25 minutes or 25 hours. Right, and nothing in between. And there's nothing in between. There is nothing in between. So what you need to do is find the blower motor, and that's easy enough to find. You just follow the new. Right, right.

And then you'll see, hopefully, three screws that attach to housing of that thing to the heater. Okay. And if you're lucky, you can take those three screws out. And the whole thing. And it'll be looking right at you. All right. We'll fall out, including all the twigs and whatever else is in there. And you'll say, oh, how lucky could one guy be?

Yeah. And this will happen if you have led a good, clean life. Oh, not a chance. All right. Not a chance. Okay. Well, get ready to spend $25. Take it to the Chevy dealer.

See you, Ray. All right. Thank you very much. Good luck. You bet. 1-8-8-8-car talk. Hey, a nice, easy question. Oh, yeah, Louis must have got last week.

Actually, for several weeks now. Oh, it's almost as if Louis the barbarian cronon has gone out of her way. Yeah, she has. To find the most difficult questions. Yeah. Imagine. Either that, or we're getting stupider. All both.

All both. Yeah. But so far, so good, Louis. the good work. One 888-88-288-2-7-8-25, a lawyer on car talk. My name is Mary. I'm from Ross Common, Michigan. Hi, Mary. How are you guys? From where, Michigan? Ross Common. Ross Common. Yeah. What end of Michigan are you in? I'm in the northern part of the lower peninsula. Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. We live right on a world-renowned trout fishing river. So do you trout fish?

I don't. My husband does. Why aren't women fishermen? Well, you're You know, there's some of them there. There aren't many. One of my neighbors at the Cape is, Janie. Well, I mean, I know, but it's rare. I mean, it's often confused me. A lot of things confuse me. But there are some pastimes and vocations that you would think women would be interested in, and they're not.

No, it's not in the genetic code. I think we just don't have a whole lot of time to develop hobbies. Exactly. I'm not going to go. gold there. What's wrong with your car, Barry? How many women sleep in the garage at night? Not many of them either. Not many of them either, because... All right, okay. Let's go back to cars. Let me tell you about my Toyota four-runner. It's a 97 Toyota four-runner. I bought it used, and after I've driven the car for a little while and it's warmed up, I turn it off. It's got this

really strange sound in the left-hand side of the engine. And it sounds like a bee that stuck between the screen and a pane of glass. And it goes like this. B-b-b-b-b-b-b-d. And about that pace. And then as the engine cools down, the buzzing slows down and eventually stops. I took it back to the dealer where I bought it.

This happens after you shut off the engine? Yes. Oh, Mary! I know. Well, you know what? We're back to the unanswerable questions. We had a streak of one going. Okay, you took it to the deal.

Help us out. Go ahead. Well, they basically, they kind of showed me because I opened the hood and I showed them where the noise was coming from and they could hear it. And they basically said they think it was part of a vacuum, something to do with a vacuum. And told me not to worry about it, but what you need to know is that I bought a Toyota from a Chevy dealership. Oh. Oh, so you brought it to the Chevy dealership? I took it back to where I bought it.

And how many times we'll do this burp, burp, burp, burp business, about 10? Oh, shoot, it can go for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes after. And what's the frequency of it? B-b-b-b-b-b-b-t. And then it cools down. It decays both in frequency and amplitude? Yes, as the engine cools. As the engine cools, eventually it's down a... And then it just kind of stops.

Yeah. They thought I was crazy. I know, you know, this woman comes in telling me her car's buzzing. Right. Does it sound metallic? No. And when you showed them where it was coming from, what were you pointing at? Do you have any idea?

It's a black box. I looked at it yesterday, and it doesn't have anything on it that would give me a name other than it looks like there are some tubes and some voltage that goes into it. Right, so there are some rubber hoses that connect to it. Yes. Does the car have cruise control? Yes. That comes in handy, you know.

Especially on long trips. I love it. We're shooting the talking. I'm pretty sure it is an emission control. device. Okay. Yeah. And it has something to do with the purge system of the evaporative emission system. Exactly what it is. Okay. It's a mystery. I don't know. Okay. But it ought to be fairly easy to open that box. You know, I actually looked for maybe a flip lever of some kind yesterday. Yeah, we use a hammer usually. But it does open. And what you'll find out of there is a bunch of

like solenoids. Okay. And what those solenoids are doing is they're controlling the vacuum routing of the emission system. Okay. God knows why the thing is doing this 20 minutes after you shut it off. Oh, yeah. But I would certainly take it to the Toyota dealer. Right, and that's, you know, the thing is that I have a distance to go to get there. Well, you might want to call them before you go and see if they have an idea.

Okay. Yeah. You were hoping that we were going to give you the idea. Well, that's because I've listened to you guys for such a long time, and you seem to be able to come up with everything. Yeah, but lately our brain cells have been peculiarly. Well, you know, we've instituted a new problem. policy. You have? Yeah, we're not going to lie anymore. Oh, darn. Sometimes those lies make us feel lots better. So whereas we used to give an answer to everyone, we have, we developed this new policy

where we're going to just say, we don't know. We really don't know. It takes a big person to be able to say, I don't know. It does. I really, I don't know. Yeah, we'll be off the year in a week, but we'll be able to try. On the other hand, going back to what we said originally, if we could, if we were clever enough, we could have made up. You could have made up. A brilliant answer. Yeah, I'm sure you could have. And don't think my brother wasn't trying. Well, thanks for calling Mary, I think.

Thanks, you guys. See you. All right, bye-bye. Man. Okay, Tommy, look, it's time for me to jog your memory. Jog. Can we try, like, walking first? Okay, again, these are fill in the blank, puzzler hints. I'm familiar with this little thing.

Okay. On any given Saturday afternoon, your wife is likely to be out blanking. Talking to a divorce. Well, maybe, but mowing the lawn was what I was looking for. Mowing the law. Okay, here's the second one. One of the many reasons I hate driving a test car after you've had it is that I know I'm going to have to put blank in it.

A couple of bottles of fabrics. No, gas. The puzzler was about an old geyser whose lawnmour was using an unusual amount of gas. Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us. Click and Clack the Tapper Brothers. And we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and the answer to last week's puzzler.

Yeah. This was sent in by a fellow named Joe Barger. And he writes, My father, Max, at about age 65, still likes to mow his own lawn with a gasoline push mower. It's not self-propelled, but it does have an engine, you know,

it's the kind of makes a lot of noise and pollutes the air. He's had the same war for like 20 years, and it's been great. Well, a few years ago, he noticed that the moor was not getting very good gas mileage. In other words, the moor was using more gas per lawn cut than it used to. And it seemed to be getting worse.

So, for example, if one tank of gas used to get him through two lawn cuttings, now a whole tank would only get him to mow the lawn one and a half times. You're with me? I'm with you. And it had to fill up in the middle of the second cut. So he knew something was wrong. He took it to the neighborhood small engine repair shop. And for about $100, they replaced the spark plug, the spark plug wire.

They gave them a new air filter, and they probably did a few other things like clean the carburetor. Of course, for $4 more, I think I mentioned, he could have gotten a whole new lawnmower. But anyway, after all the repairs, he notices that the gas mileage is still lousy. He's bummed out, and he wondered whether there's something else they should have replaced. Of course, there isn't. Now, I will add here, the engine and lawnmower are in perfect working order, the same as they were, perhaps, the day he bought the thing. The lawn isn't thicker than it used to be. The lawn density is the same as it's always.

been and the question is, what's wrong? Man. And this is something that my brother can relate to. You bet. Because... I love this puzzle. This is an outside-the-box puzzle, you know? Man!

Well, because if you had... You sometimes say that puzzles are automotive, puzzles are automotive-related puzzles. This is an engine puzzler, but it isn't. But it isn't. There's nothing to do with those. nothing to do with the lawnmower, which we stipulated, Your Honor. I love deceitful questions like this.

Has your appearance here today been affected by the deposition? Yes, he could be alive and practicing loss somewhere. At age 65, Max seeming loss of mileage with his lawnmower has to do with one thing and one thing only. The only answer is one thing. It only works. Can we hear that, Ted? You can't do it unless the number is two. When will it end?

Well, quite simply, Max is walking slower. Oh, man! I'll bet you no one got this thing right. All the geysers did. That's why you got it right away. I got it right away. No, and I've noticed the same thing. My lawn takes me more gas to more my lawn now

Because I walk slower than 10 years ago Of course, if you walk slower Of course it's gonna take longer Because it's running and doing nothing Most of the time Take an infinite amount of gas If you couldn't walk at all You start the baby up and just stand there

And that's what I do now I look at it And I say, go Come Do we have a winner? Yeah, we got a winner actually Fate Hayes Nice name from Reno Nevada And for having her answer

selected at random from the grass catcher full of correct answers that we did get. Faith is going to get a $25 gift certificate to the shameless commerce division at the car talk section of cars.com. And with that $25, she can get one and three quarters

copies of our best-selling marital counseling CD, men are from GM, women are from Ford, all about couples and cars. Indeed. One and three quarters copies. This is the most brilliant marketing strategy in anyone has ever devised. We give people

$25, and nothing costs $25. This is brilliant. I mean, I taught marketing for 40 years. You didn't come up with this. I never came up with this. That's why they drunk you out of the field. Man. Anyway, we'll have a new... It's like when you get those free...

We get a free vacation. Yeah, one night, seven days. I'm still working on it. Anyway, we'll have a new podcast. from the realm of statistics. Coming up in the third half of the show, so be sure to stick around for that. Right now, if you have a question about your car

or anything else, of course, you can call us at 1-88-88-8-8-8-2-7-8-25-5. Hello, you're on car talk. Hi, there. This is Tim, calling from Somerville-Mass. Hey, Tim. How you guys doing? Somerville Mass.

A local call. A local call. Remember they used to call Somerville the All-American City? I think Somerville-Mass still. has the dubious distinction of being the most densely populated city in the country. Absolutely. Yeah. So how many people live in your apartment, Tim?

Thirteen. So what's up? I have a 92 Honda Civic CX hatchback with about 127,000 miles on it. And ever since we had those heavy rains, I think I was hitting a lot of potholes. Now, when I go about 20 miles an hour, it kind of shifts left and right back and forth, like the wheels. kind of tilted, and then it's okay from like 40 to 60, and then over 60 it shakes like it's going to blow up. Oh, man.

Very dangerous. Really? Yeah. I wouldn't drive it over 60. I wouldn't drive it over 30. Why? You know, why? Something's going to fall off.

What? What do you care? You always say it shifts back and forth. What do you mean by that? Well, it's like if you put your hand on the steering wheel, it goes like left, right, left, right, left, right. Oh, you have a bad tire. Well, that's exactly what it is. If you're driving along slowly, especially, you'll get the wheel to oscillate, like boom, boom, boom.

Right. Have you driven really slowly and noticed it? Yes. Yeah. Then that's it. And you did it by hitting a huge pot hole. Which was hidden under a lake of water. Yeah.

I mean, there have been lots of such accidents in the last couple of months. It wasn't an accident, though. I think the city of Somerville did it intentionally. Maybe. And what you have is you have a broken belt in your tire. And if you were, in fact, were to lift up the car, it's obviously one of the front wheels. You can do this yourself with your own little jack. If you jacked up the car and spun one of the wheels and looked at the tread straight on as if you were, you know, a bug about to be run over by the car, you would see the tread deviate from the normal position that it's running.

You would see it squirming, which is exactly what it's doing. And for you to feel it this badly, it's going to be really bad. So you can identify which tire it is, but better than that, you can just take it into your local tire shop and they'll sell you one, two, or four tires. Yeah. Well, you may need four anyway. Who knows? And I certainly, I mean, I'm serious. I certainly would not drive it at high speeds because who knows what's going to happen.

Well, all right. I'm glad we could save the life of another sum of a citizen. Otherwise, the density would have gone down by one person. Right. And it might lose its spot. So I'm glad we saved you, Tim. Thanks for calling, Tim. Oh, thanks, guys.

And the mayor of Somerville, even if he's in jail, thanks you. Is he? He might be. No, she. She. Oh, she. The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, I guess, is incarcerated. No.

No, he's been indicted for something. People get indicted all the time. It's not as much as it's cracked up. No, I mean, I wouldn't read any more into that than you have to. See you, Tim. Thanks for calling, man. Bye, bye. Hey, you know what time it is?

It's time to mulch the back. of the MG? No, no, no. It's time to play. Stop the Chumps! I'm not sure I want to do this, but this is the part of the show where we hunt down a caller from a previous show to see if our answer was, like, iconic, ironic. Or more likely, moronic. No, no. So who's our lucky contestant this week? Well, of all people, it's Will Shorts, the Puzzlemaster from Weekend Edition Sunday and the New York Times. You remember when he was on? Of course I do. And you remember his problem?

Of course I don't. He had a 92 sob that occasionally wouldn't start. It usually happens at night, often when it's cold, sometimes after it snowed, and I just, the car simply won't start. Especially when you're in a place you don't want anyone to know you're supposed to be at. And when I try, maybe when I try the car the next morning, the engine starts up perfectly. Do you have an alarm system? Yes.

Do you have an automatic transmission? Yes. You know the answer to the seven down? We do get right to the heart of the matter, don't we? Anyway, what did we tell him what's wrong? I don't remember, but we surmised. I believe we were surmising that day that the alarm system was malfunctioning and cutting off the ignition. So we told him to disconnect the alarm and his problem would go away.

But we also thought... Of course it would go away because they'd steal his car and that would be it. Well, but we did think it might have been a neutral safety switch too. Will, are you there? Yes, I am. Hey. Listen, before we find out whether the alarm system was the culprit, we need to Carmen Mirandize you, so to speak. We have not spoken since your last appearance here on Cartar.

Is that true? That's correct. And the answer you're about to give here on Stump the Chumps has not been influenced by our staff, the staff of National Public Radio, or by Steph Scott Jari himself. That's correct. Okay. All right. Was it the alarm system?

Yes. Wow. Wow. And you know what impressed me so much is, I, I didn't even mention that I had an alarm system. You were the ones who you came up with that immediately. Well, it's questions that are... We've been using that answer now for three weeks straight.

And we had to pan out with somebody. We felt so good about it. So you took it to the sob dealer and they... And I've had it disconnected right after we spoke in the phone, and of course the cars worked fine ever since. Well, that's wonderful. Yeah. And we also got the cord and Ford puzzle

that you gave us. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've got, I brought two little puzzles for you today, if you're interested. Oh, of course, of course. Yeah. All right, well, the first one is an easy one.

Take the fruit name pomegranate, you know, P-O-M-E, G-R-A-N-A-T, remove the last two letters. T. And rearrange the remaining letters to name two other varieties of fruit.

Oh. I got a pear in there. Yeah. Oh, you can, oh, you don't have. use all the letters. Yeah, use them all once and remove pear and what do you get left over? Uh, I gotta use that.

A mango. There you go. That was good, especially since I didn't know how to spell pomegranate, even after you spell it for us. And I understand you guys had a little problem with mango a little while ago. We had a problem? What do you mean by a problem?

You can't do it unless the number is two. You know, you try to see if the listeners are paying attention and what happens. Oh, God. There's always one out there, but this time they were about 100. A hundred thousand is both like it. Anyway, what's the second one?

Here's your tougher one. Take a popular current make of vehicle on the road. Add a letter, rearrange the result, and you'll name another popular current make of vehicle. What vehicles are they? This is a make like Ford or Chrysler. They're both makes. They're both current. And add a letter to the first one, scramble the result, and you'll get a make.

get another make of vehicle. Oh, really? Now I'm not expecting you to get this off the top of your ad. This is hard. All right, well, we'll think about it, and we may even steal it from you this week. Well, you guys are great. I'm really impressed.

Hey, Will, thanks very much. Thanks a lot. It's a pleasure to meet you. Enjoy your car while you still have it. Thanks a lot, guy. Bye, bye-bye. If you hear someone you'd like us to bring back for Stump the Chumps and email us your suggestion from the Car Talk

section of Cars.com. I wanted to ask him if the Sunday Times Puzzler is getting hotter or I'm getting stupider. I've been breezing right through it. Hey Tommy, it's time we took a little break so our favorite public radio stations can identify themselves. And public radio listeners can take their fingers out of their ears now. We're back.

You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Collack the Tappert Brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and of the new puzzler. Well, the puzzler I was going to use from the wonderful world. of statistics and misinformation. Oh, we're not going to use that anymore? No, we're going to put on hold because we're going to use a puzzler that was just given to us by Will Shorts. Well, Frost My Shorts!

Yeah, why not? I mean, we can't figure it out. Right, here's the puzzle. Take a current make of car, you know, like a Dodge or a Buick, or a Ford, or a Hyundai. Yeah. Add a letter to it. Yeah. Scramble the letters.

and come up with another make of car. Like Saturn, if you took Saturn and added an E to it, it would be Nurtz. Nurtra. You know, you know, you got it? I got it. I mean, we don't have the answer yet. They may not be, he may have lied to us. Maybe there is no answer, which case we'll have to beat him up.

If you think you know the answer, write it on a postcard, or better still, on a Celestron next hour 11 GPS telescope with 40,000 object database. computerized hand control, permanent periodic error correction, and 279 millimeter, which were those who are metrically challenged, 11-inch aperture, Smith-Casagrin, a day reflector, and mail it to. Don't forget this big step. Well, it only weighs about 100 pounds. Puzzler Tower, Car Talk Plaza, Box 3,500, Harvard Square, Cambridge. Our Fair City. Matt 02238, or you can email your answer from the Car Talk section of what, Cars.com. If you like to call us right now, the number is 1-888-car talk.

That's 888-227-8255. Hello, you're on Car Talk. Hi, my name is Heather, and I'm calling from Sacramento, California. And my type of car is an 88 Honda to Civic, actually, hatchback. 88 Civic? Yes. Hatchback. Yes, and I purchased the car about four months ago.

and about a month ago it got stolen from my driveway. And then I got it back about four days after it got stolen, and I noticed these white, clear spiders everywhere on my car. And so what happened was I went to the movies. I came out to my car, and there was at least 20 on the outside of my car, and I opened the car door, and there was at least 20 on the inside. And they're just little clear white spiders with these little sacks on the back, and I'm thinking...

Were they whistling? Hi-ho! Hi-ho! It's off the week we go. But what I found out later is their black widow, their baby black widow. Oh, no. Are infested in my car. They are everywhere.

Do you have an ex-husband? I mean, what a very clever thing. You said, what a movie. Oh, what a mystery. Oh, God, it's you steal the car. You steal the car? Who would steal an 88 civic? No reason.

Unless you wanted to put the larvae. Heather, you've got an enemy somewhere. Do you have an ex-anything? No, I don't. I've never been married, and I have a current boyfriend, but he loves me. Do you have a trust fund? No. Have you made out your will?

No. I would. Black widow and... Black widows. Isn't it insidious that they start off white? How did you find this out? Okay, okay. So I took my car to the...

How? Now, how'd you get it there? You didn't get in the thing, did you? I had to. You got in the car? At the time, you didn't know they were black widows because they were white. At the time, I didn't know because they were white. So now I go to the car wash and I'm power spraying the engine.

I'm power spraying the undercarriage, and I'm trying to get rid of them. You can't get rid of them? Didn't you ever hear the T-Tee-weensy spider? They get washed up, but they come back? I know. But no, so I did that. When I got home, I looked underneath my car, and there was the mom. I mean, it was just a female black widow with her hourglass, and she was huge.

And then I called our UC Davis. It's a local university here, and I called her entomology department and asked all about black widows, and she said, oh, that is what you have. And I asked for suggestions, and, I mean, basically, she says, hey, extreme heat and extreme cold, and I am such at a loss, and I don't know what to do. No, they're going to. Oh, I know the answer. I know too.

Set the car on fire. Yeah, that'll work. Man. But, but, but what, at UC Davis, did they say how that, how they could have gotten there? I mean, are Black Widow spiders roaming the streets? Repropriating it will? Will? My car, when I bought it, it had a blown head gasket, so it sat for nine months prior to me buying it.

Oh, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. That's what it is. I mean, they've been in there. Okay, so you know where Mommy is? I killed her. You're like stomped on her? I killed her with a shovel. A shovel.

You weren't worried that she was going to, like, run up your pant leg? I know. I tell you, I would have thrown the keys on the front seat and walked away. And never to return. Well, you know, that is one disadvantage of letting your car sit for a long period. You do that with your car, don't you tell me, the EMG? Sitting right now. How long has it been sitting?

I'm never going to go near it again. Have your wife drive it. Hunt, back out the car. I'll meet you at the hospital. God. Oh, man. Well, you know, if heat kills them and cold, is that they don't like cold or is that it kills them?

The cold and high elevations will actually, they cannot live there, so that will actually kill them. Oh, here's what you do. You enroll in AAA. You get AAA plus. Okay? And you want... I got it.

Right? You call them up like the next day. And you tell them your car has broken down. And the repair shop is at the top of the highest mountain around. Right. In Tibet. And could they tow it there? Could they tow it there and leave the thing there?

That you have a Swami who's on a... on a mountain in Tibet, and he's going to fix the car. Because it's the wrong season. Now, even the mountains aren't going to be frozen. Heat. But see, even the desert heat, even if you took the thing to Death Valley, that's an appropriate name for this thing, isn't? It wouldn't be hard enough to kill them.

I know. I've tried foggers. You know, you buy the raid foggars, and you just let them off. Reed, are you kidding me? No, but you don't want that in the car that you're going to then get into. the stuff is deadly poison. I was bitten by a black widow spider once. That explains a lot, doesn't it?

You were? I was, yes, when I lived in Tejas. And we did also find the nest. Yeah. And we hit them with a shovel. Wow. And I lived. You did?

I was bitten by one of the children. Oh. But now that you've been. killed the mother. Yes. Don't you think the kids are going to be angry? I'm sure they're pissed off. And they know where you live.

Yeah. Yeah, you need a pro. We obviously don't know. I mean, aside from sitting the car on fire, which we're pretty sure we'll work. If it were my car, that's what I would do. I know that. But you can go to our website because we're going to get a million hits on this. People from all over the planet are going to be offering you advice.

and whoever you trust, you can use that person's advice. All right, sounds good. Well, this is one of the most interesting calls we've ever had. Wow. And the fact that you found the mother and hit her with a shovel. Don't ever hit your mother with a shovel. Makes a bad impression on her head.

Anyway. Hey, Heather, thanks for... I wish I could say thanks for calling, but I got the creepy willies now. And he's checking his underwear, right? See you later. That's all. You guys have a good day.

Hi, bye. Bye. Well, it's happened again. You've squanded at another perfectly good hour. We're listening to Car Talk. Our esteemed producer is Doug the subway fugitive. Bongo Boy Berman. Our associate producers are Louis Cronin, the Barbarian, and David, here comes to Gibraltar.

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