Secrets of That New-Car Smell

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 , 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.