RAY: this puzzler was automotive, historic, folkloric and God knows what else. And the essence of it was sent in by a listener named Steven Sloan. Jerry had worked lots of summers and he finally accumulated enough money to buy himself a brand-new '68 Volkswagen Beetle. It was a dark and stormy September night when Jerry and his college roommate pulled a brand new Beetle out of the dealership parking lot in Chicago on their way to school at the University of Wisconsin. Are you with me so far?

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: Now since the thing was brand-new and hadn't been broken in they decided that they should drive the brand-new shiny bug on the back roads so as not to be tempted to exceed the braking speed which I think was 14 miles an hour for this vehicle. They were afraid that if they drove it on the highway--you know--they'd ruin the thing.

RAY: Well, the roads they chose were rutted and muddy, and it was quite an adventure. They ran out of gas at one point, and of course as you might expect they bounced from one pothole to another and eventually had a blowout. Searching for the spare--they find it under the hood where the engine should have been. Without even reading the instruction manual they carefully replace the bad tire with the spare and then put the blown tire where the spare had been. Are you with me?

TOM: I'm with you.

RAY: They continued on their muddy route looking for a service station where they could get the flat tire fixed. Well, as luck would have it a few miles down the road, low and behold, they come across Helmut's German Car Repair and Wiener Schnitzel Emporium. An oasis, a veritable oasis of European automotive expertise and spice meat in rural Wisconsin.

TOM: All in the same place.

RAY: All under one roof. No sooner had they pulled up the driveway, carefully navigating through the mud splattered windshield, when out popped Helmut who immediately said to the driver, "You're here to get ze tire fixed, eh?" And Jerry said, "We are."

TOM AND RAY: How did you know?

RAY: And that's the question, how did Helmut know?

TOM: And don't forget, in those days there was no such thing as this undersized little spare tire that many cars have today. All the tires were exactly the same.

RAY: Yeah, in fact the spare was exactly the same make and size and everything, and Helmut had never seen them before. And he probably would admit he was taking a guess.

TOM: That's what makes it interesting.

RAY: And he made the guess based on the fact that the windshield washer in the Volkswagen of that era operated on the tire pressure of the spare tire.

If the tire pressure dropped down enough, then the washer would stop working, and saving enough air in the spare so you could use it as such. But if you had a flat and you had no air whatsoever --

TOM: Then you would have no windshield washer.

RAY: And thus a mud splattered windshield.

TOM: Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho --

RAY: So who's our winner?

TOM: Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. The winner is Antonio Otero from the Bronx, New York.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]