TOM: Yes, we do. The winner this week is Joan Britton from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And for having her answer selected at random from among those two correct answers that we got…"
So they said they only received two correct answers*.
Was there ever a puzzler that no one answered correctly?
This would indicate that they read all of the answers. I find this surprising because they must get a ton of them! Maybe they do word searches on them to whittle them down. For example, they may have searched for the word “sugar” in the answer linked to above.
For this: note that it is statistically equivalent to pick random answers until you get a correct one, discarding any wrong ones you get along the way (which is probably a very small number, like zero or one). I figure the producers do this. They certainly wouldn’t bother sifting out only the correct answers and then having a separate draw from just those.
As a side note, there are no more new Car Talk recordings being made as of this month, so presumably the question of picking winners has become moot. (The producers are still constructing episodes from used and unused archival material, though, so the show will still air.)
I have a lot to catchup on recent Cartalk episodes. But glancing at the show titles in the podcast feed, I am curious: There doesn’t seem to one final farewell show. Is that correct? (Granted, there will be new episodes mixed together from old material, but still).
Ok. So I guess I mistook their facetiousness for seriousness (what was I thinking?). So it sound like no one is aware of a time that the puzzler was not solved.