A Dark and Stormy Puddle

We have yet another automotive puzzler! We are doing well with these recently. Okay, here it is.

There is this guy, we will call him Fred.

Fred and his wife are driving along one day and they are in their automobile in a rainstorm, and they come to a portion of the road that has been flooded out. There is a huge puddle. Fred immediately comes to a halt in front of the puddle and his wife says, "What's the matter, Freddie?"

Fred is looking at this lake in front of him, this huge puddle and he says, "I can't drive through this...It looks really deep. So, I'll tell you what. We are going to sit here and wait until another car comes, from either direction and see how that car does crossing this amount of water."

So that is what they do. They wait and wait. It is a dark and stormy night, more water comes down. Finally, they see the headlights of another car approaching from ahead. So they watch this car as it eases into the puddle trying to cross. And they watch as the car gets deeper and deeper into the puddle. It is getting really serious. The water is getting over the door sills, that is how deep they are.

Sure enough, after a time the car emerges from the puddle and comes out the other side. And his wife says, "See Fred, I told you. We can make it. Now let's go."

So, Fred is just about to go and try to cross the puddle, he watches as the car that's coming out of the puddle goes on by. He notices something about that car that makes him stop dead in his tracks. He does not cross the puddle.

What did he see? What did he notice about the other car that made him decide not to enter the puddle to cross to the other side? Why did he change his mind and decide not to try to cross himself?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Broken Brakes

It is finally time for the new puzzler. This one is a true automotive puzzler. I think we owe the crowd an actual automotive puzzler, at this point.

Here's one from the old days. A customer came into the shop a while back. This customer had various problems with his car, one of which was a problem that he had taken to several shops and nobody was able to figure out. It was that when he went on long drives, he would frequently lose his brakes. In other words, the pedal would feel very mushy and would just sink to the floor, and the brakes would be completely ineffective. He had taken the car to several shops over the course of several months and nobody had been able to figure it out. Including us. We couldn't figure it out either.

Parts had been replaced, master cylinders, calipers... This guy had spent so much on this, and he still had the problem. No one knew what was wrong.

Anyway, he comes in and says, "Hey, I need an oil change, I need to pass state inspection, tires rotated and I have some lights that don't work... If you're interested, you can look at that brake problem again."

And we said, "No, no. We don't know what's wrong with the brakes."

So, we fixed all the other problems, including his brake lights, which were not working. We fixed it by putting a new brake light switch in, but we didn't even look at the actual brakes. We didn't have time for going over that again. We changed the oil and did everything else he asked.

And then, about a week or two later he called us and said, "How did you fix my brakes?"

And we said, "What do you mean, how did we fix your brakes? We didn't fix your brakes."

And he said, "Well, that problem I had where the brakes would just disappear, it's gone. it isn't a problem anymore. What did you do?"

And we said, "We did nothing!"

So, he drives the car for several more weeks, and indeed, the problem is fixed. The problem never returned.

So the puzzler question is, what did we do that day that accidentally fixed his brakes?