My son brought home a little blue cardboard-tree car deodorizer that said "New Car Smell" right on it, but, he said, "This does not smell like a new car." He dangled it in front of my face.
I closed my eyes, imagined myself in a new Audi A8, and inhaled deeply. He was right. Too, uh, kitchen-y. Essence of lemons. I hung it on a pipe under the kitchen sink.
But the question of what, exactly, is that new-car smell nagged at me, sort of like the God thing when I was about 12 years old. You know, can He see me doing this, even though I have the covers over me?
I stopped at an Audi-Nissan dealership, locked myself in a Nissan, and sat there. I could smell leather if I pressed my nose against the seatback, but I couldn't really put my finger on what else I was smelling. Plastic maybe? Armor All? A couple of salesmen tapped politely on my window, but I shook my head. "Just looking," I mouthed.
Perhaps my nose isn't discriminating enough. What I needed was someone who could detect layers of aroma and find the words to describe them. Who better than a wine guy? A good sommelier can smell a glass of wine and tell you what kinds of weeds grew in the grape arbor.
Wine guy Jeff Hennig, the dapper fortyish sommelier for the tony Valbella!! restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut, agreed to come with me and smell cars.
We figured Bentley must be the gold standard when it comes to smelling good, so we went to that dealership first. We slid into a 2003 steel-blue Arnage.
"Boat shop," said Hennig. Eyes closed, he held up one hand, palm out. "This conjures up a cavernous vintage boat hangar, mahogany or varnished rosewood, lovingly crafted, hand-rubbed. All natural, nothing artificial or manufactured." I imagined myself in a 1954 Chris-Craft.
Although everyone nods knowingly when you say, "New-car smell," smells differ from car to car. For example, Hennig and I smelled an older "new" car, a 2001 Arnage, and Hennig's notes read, "Boom! Leather and beurre noisette. Rich without being overbearing."
A 2003 Ferrari 360 Modena offered a completely different experience. "Subtle, stiff smells of burnished metal and dry leather. A harder, more masculine smell, short bits of hide, gunmetal. This smell is straightforward, fast, and clean. The aroma is quickly perceived and erased."
Another 360 Modena was "a mélange of basketball, football, and baseball leather. Bright, bold rubberized smells." And a third Modena, a Spider, was "like smelling the palm of a well-broken-in kidskin driving glove."
There appeared to be no consistency, sort of like perfume that smells different on different women. However, Richard Charlesworth, director of special customer commissions and heritage for the Bentley Motor Company (how about that title?), assures me Bentley's quality-control guys are clinically anal. Virtually all the materials used in the interiors of its automobiles are natural. Leather comes exclusively from Scandinavian cows because they don't use barbed wire there (cattle are gently corralled with hedges and wood fences) and the temperature is too cool for those nasty warble flies that bore holes into a cow's hide. Dashboards are hand-rubbed wood instead of plastic, which creates "outgases" that dust the inside of windshields. Up till now, I had thought that was dirt.
Jaguar has a "smell team." Toyota reports that it has an ongoing effort to improve the "interior atmosphere" of all its cars. We sniffed a Lexus that, according to Hennig, had a "very unattractive smell of cleaner of some sort. No wood or leather." Curiously, there were both in the interior of that car.
Audi AG in Ingolstadt, Germany, has a "nose team" that smells the interiors of cars and materials samples. Manuela Frank, a member of the team, says that at Audi they are striving for a "low-smell environment." Every morning at 11 o'clock, Frank (in the foreground on the previous page) and her team smell heated-up dashboards or fabric swatches. "This afternoon," said Frank in lilting English, "we are smelling the interior of a finished car."
The nose team takes care of its noses by always avoiding strong perfumes and seasonings, and they limit their smell sessions to six specimens over 15 minutes. "After that, you are not discerning," she said. "Like wine tasters, we have rules."
Ford was refreshingly hospitable and forthcoming about its smell control. Linda Graham, supervisor of the body-materials engineering department, explained the drill. "Suppliers have to run their materials through our smell test," she said and handed me a two-page document that read like an eighth-grade science project.
With a straight face, engineers must suspend samples in a common glass canning jar above 30 milliliters of water, close the jar tightly, and bake it in an oven at 40 degrees Celsius for 16 hours. A jury of smellers (at least six people) then opens the jar, smells, and rates it according to the following:
- No odor.
- Detectable, but not disturbing.
- Disturbing.
- Extremely disturbing.
There is no category for "new-car smell."
In 1988, Ford developed an electronic nose, an expensive piece of machinery which proved to be a disappointment. No matter how extensively the electronic nose was programmed, subtle nuances were missed. "There's no substitute for the human nose," said Graham. "The human nose knows instinctively what smells bad. We don't use the electronic nose anymore."
Like other car manufacturers, Ford works to eliminate offensive odors rather than creating pleasant ones. "But almost everything has some smell," said Graham.
General Motors does not have a standardized smell test, but damned if those Cadillacs don't smell good. Most people attribute that to Nuance leather. Jim Embach, design technology manager for the General Motors Design Center, worked on the team that developed Nuance, and he said they actually built entire cars with an assortment of materials and then had customers sit in them and rate them. "A total contextual experience," he said. According to Embach, the test cars were then dismantled.
How leather gets to smell so good is a real feat, since the tanning process removes virtually all the cow odor, which is a good thing. The products used to soften and shine the leather give it its smell. "Most leathers used to be processed with fish oil," said Embach. "You only thought it smelled good because you were holding a Coach bag or sitting in an expensive car. Close your eyes, and you'd have smelled whale blubber."
That was the Corinthian-leather smell that Ricardo Montalban was pushing for Chrysler back in the '70s, and the Connolly-leather smell that Her Majesty's leather company was so proud of before it went kaput.
"The beauty of leather is that it is very sensuous," said Pat Oldenkamp, vice-president of design and marketing for Eagle Ottawa, a major supplier of leather for the automotive industry. "We spend a lot of time making sure that the touch of the leather is right, the smell and color. It's all important." It is Eagle Ottawa that provides Nuance leather for those sexy Cadillacs.
Fish oil, these days, has been replaced by synthetic products for finishing leathers.
"The new-car smell is a chemical smell," said Stuart Walman, vice-president and general manager of Medo Industries, a subsidiary of Shell Lubricants that developed a deodorizing spray called Ozium, available at auto-parts stores and carwashes. The words "That New Car Smell" are emblazoned in big letters on the can.
Ozium was created in the 1940s as a sanitizing spray, but it eventually caught on with car people. Dealerships use it to freshen used cars. Car detailers use it. Car owners use it to keep their cars smelling nice. Walman, affectionately known in the business as "the Nose," is comfortable admitting that smell is a valuable marketing tool. "Call the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia," he said. "It does plenty of olfactory studies for the automotive industry."
Monell, a nonprofit research center, would not comment about the new-car smell because of the "proprietary nature of its work." Neither would International Flavors & Fragrances, a New York City corporation that researches taste and smell. However, Chuck Wysocki, a neuroscientist at Monell, readily offered that smell contributes to a consumer's choice of product. "There's an unconscious processing," he said. "People definitely respond to odor."
"It doesn't always make sense," said Dave Delezenne, quality-control manager for a startup company in Port Huron, Michigan, that is working on a new formula for a solvent-free, ultraviolet-cured paint. "Solvents have a strong smell, and they're toxic as well, but it's what customers are used to. When we brought samples of our paint to people, they missed the 'paint' smell, even though it was harmful. 'It doesn't smell like paint,' they told us. And we thought, 'Should we make it smell like paint?'"
It was the solvents that customers liked to smell, and that smell was bad for them. You couldn't talk them out of it. People like the smell that calls out "new" and "fresh" and "money."
Bentleys and Rolls-Royces smell dizzyingly like leather. Less expensive cars smell more like a new shower curtain or newly installed wall-to-wall carpeting. Hennig's notes on a 2004 Acura TSX , for example: "Very one-dimensional, nothing lying underneath. Clean, pleasant, sterile, a touch of plastic." Or a 2003 Acura 3.2TL: "Very faint, almost an absence of aromas. No leather smell at all. Light plastic or cleaner." A 2003 Ford Escape was "mixed aromas of leather, rubber mats, carpet, and plastic."
Three years ago, scientists at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation presented a study that exposed that new-car smell as toxic. Among other things, benzene, acetone, styrene, and toluene (whatever they are) were floating around in your car, scary volatile organic compounds (VOCs) just itching to fog up the inside of your windshield, stuff up your nose, and give you a headache—or cancer.
The result of this scare was that automakers began working on neutralizing odors while respecting their customers' desire for "that new-car smell."
Not one car manufacturer admitted to creating a scent, although once in a while one would accuse a competitor of doing so: infusing a piece of plastic with an aroma and installing it under a seat, for example, or blowing a fragrance into the plastic bags that cover the seats during shipment. Car manufacturers say they are working toward a neutral environment, and the smell that lingers is the stuff they can't—or don't need to—eliminate.
"The vinyl used back in the '50s gave most cars that smell," said Embach. "We don't use it anymore. We have better materials now, and the new materials don't smell like plastic."
It looks as though younger generations won't associate floating VOCs with the experience of buying a new car. "That new-car smell" will become something old folks recall with nostalgia whenever they break open a new plastic shower curtain. Kinda sad.
Sherri Daley is a freelance writer and the author of High Cotton: Love and Death on Wall Street, a book about commodities traders. She lives in Connecticut and drives a mostly odorless Tiburon.
