#2602: Lincoln Logs or a Lincoln Continental?
The Best of Car Talk
NPR
4.7 • 16.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charlotte and her husband have woven a tangled web, indeed. They just adopted four kids between 10 and 6 years old and the little darlings are getting into everything! Charlotte wonders if they should buy a junk car for her little mechanics to while away their young days taking it apart in the driveway. Click and Clack relive their youth on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR and the following message come from National Public Radio with us |
| 0:29.6 | Click and Clack to Tappert Brothers, and we're broadcasting this week from the center for the study of the decline of Western civilization, or from Pythagoras to the Cheese Steak |
| 0:39.4 | here in Cartagos Plaza. |
| 0:41.8 | Go, Tommy. |
| 0:42.9 | Well, I mean, I have here this tome. |
| 0:45.9 | I mean, literally a tome by P.B. Wombat, the automatic decline of Western morals. |
| 0:52.6 | And basically, I'll summarize it for you in a sentence |
| 0:55.7 | or two. |
| 0:57.0 | Basically, what P.B. Wombat says is that the decline of America is due to the automatic |
| 1:03.9 | transmission, which actually came way back in the 40s. |
| 1:09.2 | It made us lazy. |
| 1:10.3 | Made us lazy. |
| 1:11.5 | And I'll just read you a couple of quotes. |
| 1:14.3 | And he says, |
| 1:16.0 | The evil doings of the automatic transmission are hidden, of course. |
| 1:19.5 | We don't know that our wills and desires are being taken away while we are driving. |
| 1:24.5 | It is simply a matter, after all, of not thinking. We don't need to think |
| 1:29.5 | about the differences between shifting and not shifting because the shifting happens for us. We don't |
| 1:34.5 | think about being responsible for getting the car moving by any coordinated action of our own. |
| 1:39.6 | It just happens. Slowly, this decline in personal responsibility creeps into other aspects of our lives. |
| 1:47.4 | We don't want to be responsible for getting up and changing the channel so we have a remote |
| 1:52.2 | control. We don't want to do the right thing and do the dishes so we have a dishwasher. |
... |
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