A Weighty Weigh-In

RAY: Now the beautiful obfuscation here was that they went to the gas station and filled up the tires.

TOM: Yeeessss.

RAY: And filling up the tires had nothing to do with the weight of the truck.

TOM: No.

RAY: But going to the gas station, even though they didn't get gas, may have planted the seed that the reason the truck weighed 40 pounds less is that had burned 40 pounds of gas or about six gallons.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: After that first trip. So when it left the dump the first time, went back to the job site, filled up and came back it burned six gallons of gas.

TOM: Because it was far away.

RAY: Eh, I didn't tell you how far it was. But it was after lunch so it had to have been far away. Pretty good, huh?

TOM: Wow.

RAY: So who's our winner?

TOM: That's, that's great. The winner is Ed Voleva, from Newburgh, Indiana, and for having his answer selected at random from among the pile of correct answers that we got, Ed is going to get a 26-dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at cartalk.com, with which I should tell ya, he can get a 20th anniversary Car Talk T-shirt with our greasy fingerprints pre-installed on it. This is actually a replica of the original Car Talk T-shirt. Remember the original shirt?

RAY: I do. In the early days we used to say, if you won the puzzler you got the Car Talk T-shirt. But at that time there was only one T-shirt.

TOM: Yah.

RAY: You got to wear it for a week, and then you had to wash it and send it to the next week's winner. We were a more frugal operation in those days. Kind of shoestring you know?

TOM: Yeah, well now you can get your very own original Car Talk T-shirt for keeps, Ed, for being this week's puzzler winner.

RAY: And, don't forget that our extremely useless Car Talk parking permits are back, and are free with any Shameless Commerce order.

TOM: Why do people want those? I don't get it.

RAY: Well, it's a conversation piece, you get to say, hey, it doesn't let me park anywhere but it sure looks good on my window, doesn't it?

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]