RAY: This puzzle was sent in by Stephen Ceylon. Here it is:

Jerry had worked lots of summers and he had finally accumulated enough money to buy himself a brand-new 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.

RAY: It's 1968 and it was a dark and stormy September night that Jerry and his college roommate pulled the brand-new Beetle out of the dealership parking lot in Chicago on their way to college at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. Now, since the thing was brand new and hadn't been broken in they decided to drive the shiny new bug on the back roads of Wisconsin, so as not to exceed the break in speed.

TOM: Sure.

RAY: Well, anyway, the roads they chose were muddy and rutted, and it was really quite an adventure. I mean they ran out of gas, and you know they, on these roads they were bouncing from one pothole to another and eventually they had a blowout as you might expect.

TOM: Ah, gee, a brand-new car.

RAY: Well, searching for the spare they found it under the hood where the engine should have been. And you know without even reading the instruction manual they carefully replaced the bad tire with the spare and then put the blown tire where the spare had been, and they continued on their muddy route looking for a service station where they could get the flat tire repaired. Well, a few miles down the road, low and behold, they come across, are you ready for this, Helmut's German Car Repair.

An oasis of European automotive expertise in rural Wisconsin. I mean, what are the chances of that?

No sooner had they pulled up the driveway carefully navigating through the mud splattered windshield, then out popped Helmut who immediately said to the driver, "You're here to get ze tire fixed? Eh?"

TOM: Oh.

RAY: And Jerry said -- We are. How did you know?

RAY: And the question is, how did Helmut, who had never seen them before, know?

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]