Car Talk was a live radio show featuring MIT graduates, auto mechanics, and brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi. It ran for 25 years on National Public Radio, after ten years on WBUR-FM. Since the Magliozzis retired from broadcasting in 2012, the show now consists of previously-aired clips edited together, called The Best of Car Talk. Car Talk combined humor with automotive advice, and relied on the entertaining banter between the Magliozzi brothers. They never took themselves, or the show, too seriously.
“They’re just machines,” Ray told The New York Times in 1988, after recently purchasing 1987 Dodge pickup. “This is not brain surgery. It falls apart, you get another one.”
All this time, Car Talk built a huge audience. Ray and Tom had a vague sense of this, but tried their best to stay oblivious.
“When we were sitting here, just us and [producer David Greene] and [producer Doug Berman] and the engineer it never came into my mind like, ‘Oh, I better do my best possible job because there are four or five million people listening,’ Ray says. “We tried to do our best anyway in whatever that was. We never went out of our way to try to be funny. We never went out of our way to try to give the right answer necessarily although we did try, but we didn’t go to extreme measures.”
Fans of Car Talk will want to read an interview with Ray Magliozzi about his automotive philosophy, his brother (Tom died in 2014), and their radio show at Jalopnik.
One of my favorite parts of the show is Stump the Chump, where they revisited problems that they've helped troubleshoot to see if their advice was correct or not.