RAY: RAY: Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and of the answer to last week's Puzzler. This one was from the wonderful world of statistics and academia.

TOM: I can honestly say I have no recollection whatsoever.

RAY: In 10 seconds you're going to say, "Ha, yeah, OK." A graduate student at one of the institutions of higher learning in Our Fair City was writing his dissertation on the relationship between uncontrollable outside forces in automobile accidents. He collected thousands and thousands of accident reports from the state of Massachusetts and correlated the time of the accident ...

TOM: Oh, 15 seconds. I get it now.

RAY:With all the other factors, like temperature, road conditions, automobile size, age of the driver, alcohol usage, speed limits.

TOM: Color of hair, color of car.

RAY: Exactly.

TOM: All that stuff. Yeah.

RAY:After thousands of hours of data input and computer crunching, he discovered an amazing statistic. So amazing that he collected thousands more statistics from neighboring states to see if his findings could possibly be correct. After many more hundreds of hours and seven more years of grad school, he found the absolute safest ...

TOM: Which his father was paying for.

RAY: Of course. He found the absolute safest time of the year to drive an automobile on a public highway. So safe, in fact, that not one ... not one single accident had occurred.

TOM: Really?

RAY: Still not able to believe his own conclusions, he returned to collecting more accident reports, this time nationwide.

TOM: Post-doc. Yeah.

RAY:After many more thousands of hours inputting data and crunching numbers and several more years of grad school, he found that nationwide there have been only a few accidents during this time, but statistically less than 2 percent of the number of accidents in any other time frame. The question is: What was the safest time of the year to drive on a public highway, and why?

TOM: That's really the wrong question, isn't it? Now that I think of it; now that I know the answer.

RAY: Why is it the wrong question?

TOM: The safest time of the year?

RAY: Ah, well.

TOM: See, it's not the safest time of the year.

RAY: There is no time.

TOM: It's just the data happened to show it because he was a moron, and all those jerks in academia kept paying for his research because they got no more brains than he had.

RAY: Well, I bet it took a long time to figure out ...

TOM: I bet it did. It took us a while.

RAY: Because there is a phenomenon that occurs, I think, the first Sunday in April now ...

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: Where we turn our clocks ahead. And it occurs at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. So, if you were a police officer at 2:00 a.m., when you're supposed to change the clock ahead ...

TOM: You change it to 3:00.

RAY: You change your watch to 3:00. So it is impossible for an accident to be recorded between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. on that first Sunday.

TOM: That one day a year.

RAY: And that is indeed the safest time to drive. And, of course, nationwide there were some accidents when he did the nationwide investigation.

TOM: Oh, yeah.

RAY: Because there were a couple of states, Indiana and Arizona, that don't do daylight saving time, to the best of my knowledge.

TOM: Wow.

RAY: Do we have a winner?

TOM: Yes, we do. And quite a little Puzzler that was. And congratulations to Doris Bailey from Burlington, Vermont. Isn't that one of my favorite places.

RAY: Ah, we know.

TOM: Ah, I know. Everyone I know went to UVM; everyone. Burlington, Vermont. Anyway, Doris Bailey from UVM in Burlington and all those places, from having your answer selected at random from the trunkful of correct answers that we got this week, you're going to get a $25 gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at the Car Talk section of cars.com. And with this $25 gift certificate you can get a "Best of Car Talk" or "Second Best of Car Talk" CD. Hey, what you mean? She can get the entire thing for $25?

RAY: Yeah.

TOM: Not, like, 24/25 of it or something?

RAY: No, no, the whole thing.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]