Braking News: KPBS Will Keep Airing ‘Car Talk’ After Click and Clack Retire

Updated at 4:12 p.m. June 8, 2012

KPBS says it will continue to run Car Talk on weekends even with no new shows produced by retiring brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi.

The news out of Boston on Friday was that the Magliozzis—better known as Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, the Saturday morning radio mechanics on NPR's Car Talk—are calling it quits, according to press reports and NPR communications.

Nancy Worlie, spokeswoman for the SDSU-based public radio station, told Patch that Car Talk will be “repurposed in a very professional way,” with segments combined by producers in a fresh manner.

“It's not like Car Talk will disappear from our schedule,” Worlie said Friday afternoon in a phone interview. 

On weekends, she said, Car Talk is the No. 2-rated show at KPBS, behind Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!  

Worlie said KPBS learned of the pair’s retirement plans via an NPR memo Friday morning. 

The show will continue to air in such reruns, but after 25 years of giving at once useful and hilarious advice on car maintenance to callers with every manner of malfunction, no new episodes will be produced, said press reports.

Older brother Tom is 74 years old, and Ray is 63.

Car Talk was first broadcast on WBUR in Boston in 1977. It's now the most popular program on NPR and is heard coast-to-coast. The hour show is heard locally at 10 a.m. Saturdays and 1 p.m. Sundays on KPBS, 89.5 FM.