McFeatters: NPR's 'Car Talk' took us on a joy ride

Here's bad news for fans of cars, radio and car radios: Tom and Ray Magliozzi are going to park "Car Talk" for good this September.

The show will live on, after a fashion, as the producers will continue to cobble together "best-of" material from their archive of more than 1,200 shows.

The brothers' many fans want to say, "Say it ain't so." But the Magliozzis put in 35 years of doing the broadcast, 25 of them on National Public Radio, providing a boisterous and raucous antidote to NPR's traditional solemnity.

They've earned their retirement. Tom is 74, and his brother, Ray, 63, said that even one hour of work a week was getting to be too much for Tom. Fraternal kidding was a big part of their show.

Although both had MIT degrees, they arrived at their show-business careers through the Cambridge, Mass., counterculture.

Tom opened a garage based on the idea of renting tools and space to people who wanted to fix their own cars. Ray joined him and, realizing that the two of them were going to end up doing most of the work anyway, they converted the operation into a conventional repair shop, the Good News Garage.

"Car Talk" was a call-in show for gearheads, full of joshing, bad puns and good advice. The brothers could be stern with their automotive brethren if they suspected that a listener, especially a woman, was being ripped off.

Thanks to rebroadcasts, podcasts and satellite radio, "Car Talk" will keep cruising the airwaves, and the brothers, who go by "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers," will continue to do their column.

Drive safely, guys, and thanks.

Dale McFeatters is a senior correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service in Washington.