If buying a new car weren’t exciting enough, the smell associated with these vehicles is added to further sell (no pun intended) customers on the idea. The scent of clean leather and carpet can attract many new car buyers, and some even pursue this scent without buying a new car, as people can find air fresheners or sprays with this smell.
However, new research from the Beijing Institute of Technology and Peking University found that the gases giving the “new car smell” can actually be emitted at toxic levels, particularly on hot days. As the Earth gets warmer due to climate change, this issue may become more severe as more drivers experience this problem.
Why Is New Car Smell Popular?
A 2013 study found that certain odors can elicit an emotional response, which companies have tried to use to their advantage in various industries, from restaurants baking fresh bread to making a hospital smell of cleaning chemicals.
Car manufacturers and dealerships are no different. They try to use a combination of odors to create the new car smell, which they hope a potential customer will associate with luxury, performance, and even a good deal. The car manufacturing company Nissan even has a professional “smeller” that tests whether the scent of their vehicles, made using a combination of plastic, glue, leather, and vinyl, is just right.
However, once the car begins to be used, the smell within the vehicle starts to fade as it becomes diluted with other scents that accumulate over time. According to an Irish Times article, the scent deteriorates by as much as 20% every week the car is used, forcing new car smell lovers to find air fresheners or other sources that provide new car aromas.
What, Chemically, is New Car Smell?
The new car smell begins to fade because, chemically, the scent is made of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are gases released by materials like vinyl or leather in a process known as “outgassing.” While VOCs eventually evaporate into the air, they can interact with our senses, irritating them. Other symptoms include dry cough, headaches, eye, throat, or nose inflammation, fatigue, disorientation, and even lung disease.
The most common VOCs associated with such issues in new car smells include ethylbenzene, xylene, toluene, trimethylbenzene, and styrene, which are all used in leather or rubber products, glues, and even gasoline.
The Toxicity of Cleanliness
While outgassing may not occur regularly, in their recent paper published in PNAS Nexus, the researchers found that on warmer days with temperatures ranging from 25.3 °C– 46.1 °C (77.5 °F–115 °F), outgassing was more likely to occur. During these days, the researcher found high levels of formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and hexaldehyde, sometimes twice the national allowed limit of these gases in vehicles originating from China.
As objects warm up, their atoms move faster, and some get ejected as gas. With the Earth experiencing warmer temperatures due to the effects of climate change, the researchers highlight that the toxic VOCs from the new car smell could be a significant issue in the future as people continue to buy cars.
Using machine learning, the researchers modeled their data and found that the surface temperatures of the plastic, leather, vinyl, and other “new car smell” sources contributed to whether these sources produced higher levels of VOCs. The researchers hope their model can be used to predict VOCs in other vehicles and perhaps even be implemented as a preventative measure to make cars safer.
Getting Rid of New Car Smell
While using a car will gradually cause the new car smell to disappear, there are other factors that can also lead to reductions in the scent in your vehicle. Experts recommend removing plastic coverings from the inside of the car and letting the car sit with the windows rolled down for increased ventilation to help remove the odor. Other methods include keeping an open container of baking soda in the car to absorb the odor or taking the car to be thoroughly cleaned.
Kenna Hughes-Castleberry is the Science Communicator at JILA (a world-leading physics research institute) and a science writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with her on X or contact her via email at kenna@thedebrief.org