RAY: Hello. We're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers and here is the answer to last week's puzzler.

TOM: I happen to remember the puzzler.

RAY: Good.

TOM: About the big truck.

RAY: Who cares?

TOM: The one with the high pressured... Oh, sorry.

RAY: Anyway, this puzzler was inspired by a photograph that I saw in the paper recently. Picture this. I'm driving... this is all contrived obviously for the purposes of obfuscation.

TOM: No.

RAY: And, and --

TOM: You mean that these puzzlers that you give us week after week are not absolutely the --

RAY: Well, mostly. This particular one happens to be a contrived incident. Anyway, I'm driving down the highway and I see way up ahead one of those big diesel tractor-trailer trucks and it is spewing from its smokestacks the vilest, blackest, thickest, nastiest smoke imaginable.

TOM: Chrysler make this vehicle? No. We don't want to talk about it.

RAY: Anyway, as I'm closing in on the guy, I see him pull over to the side of the road. The thing is still running and the smoke is just pouring out. It's brutal. So, being a nice guy, I pull up next to him and roll down my passenger window and say, "Hey, you knucklehead, you're killing everyone behind you. Why don't you shut that thing off?" He says, "I did. I turned it off, but it won't stop running."

TOM: Phew.

RAY: So, I say, "Well, obviously something's wrong. Why don't you stall it out?" He says, "I can't. It's got an automatic transmission, but don't worry, he adds. In a couple of minutes, the engine will be seized and it'll stop."

TOM: And he's happy about this.

RAY: So, the 90,000th motorist behind him. Anyway, I look at an emblem on the side of his truck and in an instant I know why. Why the engine's going to stop running and seize up.

TOM: I got it.

RAY: What did that emblem say?

TOM: Fiat. No? No.

RAY: No. He was, as we know, from the earlier --

TOM: I happen to know the answer.

RAY: Description, he's driving a diesel truck, but the emblem I see says, "Turbo charge."

TOM: Yes, indeed.

RAY: And the reason he can't shut the thing off is that the turbo charger has failed and it is sucking the crank case oil out of the engine.

TOM: We should mention that the way that you shut off an alter... a regular car is when you turn the key to the off position, you're stopping the spark from occurring.

RAY: Right. And the way you turn off a diesel --

TOM: Which ain't got no stinking spark --

RAY: No. You shut off the fuel.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: So, you close a valve which prevents fuel from getting the tank to the injectors and the engine obviously shuts down, but now with the turbo failed, it doesn't need the fuel in the tank anymore, it's using the motor oil as a fuel.

TOM: Umm.

RAY: And that's why the smoke is thick and black and ugly and vile and nasty.

TOM: And what's going to happen is it's going to suck all 38 quarts of oil out of that giant --

RAY: In about five minutes.

TOM: Out of that giant diesel engine and when the oil is gone, then it's --

RAY: Boom!

TOM: Gonna stop.

RAY: Pretty good, huh?

TOM: I, I, I like it.

RAY: Anyway, who's our winner this week?

TOM: Ah. We have a winner. Here it is. Ooh. The winner is Lee Vande Visse from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and what or whoever you are Lee, for having your correct answer chosen at random, from among the thousands of correct answers that we had, you're going to get one of our Unencumbered by the Thought Process coffee mugs, which on one side has a magnificent emblem.

RAY: It's a good thing we're not giving anyway anything gender specific like jockey shorts, we wouldn't be able to --

TOM: No. We wouldn't know which ones to give to Lee Vand-e-vis.

RAY: Even if she told us the size, we might not know. Or he...

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]