I suppose the inverse of today’s Autopian ask is an easy one: New Car Smell is the best car smell. It’s also the only good smell that comes to mind, at least for me, amongst the many, many smells associated with cars – which are mostly not-good, and to varying degrees bad, awful, and/or gross.
OK, but what do you mean by car smells? Smells produced by cars? Well, sure, those odors are of course on the list. In fact, Matt, presumably mid The Morning Dump, instantly offered burnt clutch as the worst car smell. Indeed, there is no Burnt Clutch scented Little Trees Air Freshener for a reason. Brian (Silvestro, but you should be on a first-name basis by now) countered with “diff oil,” and “hot-ass brake dust,” not to be confused with “hot ass-brake dust,” which is a different thing that also smells bad.
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I would like to raise Matt and Brian with cherry-red catalytic converter under my Dodge Omni in college, the glowing box of hot stench that befouled my secretly-a-Talbot hatchback halfway through a date. It was a bit of a mood-killer TBH.
I would also count as car-smells any odors one is likely to encounter in a car, even if not car-generated. Obviously, “blown-out diaper” and “carsick puke” are way up there. But I’m also strangely grossed out by food smells; a big bag of In-N-Out smells delicious on the way home, but when I get into the car later and the smell of Double-Doubles and animal-style fries hits my nose anew, it makes me wanna hurl.
Your turn: What’s The Worst Car Smell?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
I have one, but it’s “smells encountered in a car”, not “smells encountered because of cars”, sorry.
My mother has always been not just a dog person (she’s also a cat person, now… RIP Boo, may you forever cuten the Rainbow Bridge) but in at least one way a dog *enthusiast*, if you will. She’s all-but-nuts about a particular rare breed called the Scottish Deerhound. Most people have seen an Irish Wolfhound, but not a Scottish Deerhound, which is about 3/4 the size, and has a dark, almost black, very wiry coat… and, typically, the speed of a greyhound on a racetrack (plz don’t spend money on dog races, BTW, they treat the dogs horribly) and the curiosity and friendliness of a Golden Retriever.
…which is how we got Gracie, the third Deerhound Mom has ever owned. (Sad news up front, Gracie died in 2007, sadly… but I know the Rainbow Bridge has a beachfront somehow, and Gracie is waiting there, running like she always loved to here on Earth, when we’d go to Topsail Island with her.)
Gracie came from a kennel named Nightwatch, a few states away. Virginia, I think? I don’t remember any more. They were one of the dog breeders that feed their dogs on a raw meat diet. Apparently this is a thing with breeders and dog owners, it’s kind of the equivalent of the Paleo diet for people.
Gracie also was carsick, invariably, whenever we took her somewhere. We learned this the hard way. Never quite did get that smell out.
Worse… you know that pet odor-and-mess spray, “Out!”? One of the early enzymatic cleaners. Well… it has a very particular smell to it.
To this day, the smell of Out is a psychological trigger for my gag reflex. It’s something I have to breathe through… well away from wherever I used it.
So that’s my #WorstCarSmell — the stink of Out! enzymatic pet-mess cleaning spray in a hot car.
There is nothing on, in, or under my car that smells worse than differential oil.
Now we’re talking about something this old paramedic knows about!
1) Cheap wine, partially digested, mixed with stomach acid and bile, and liberally applied to your Medic’s pants while they hold your drunk ass sideways on the backboard so you don’t drown in it.
2) Stale urine. See #1, above.
3) Cooked flesh and hair after you get defibrillated for the 20th time.
Honorable Mention) the pink slurry they drop from air tankers to fight wild land fires. It’s a fish emulsion. My partner wanted to take pictures of some airdrops, since they were happening right down the middle of Main Street, and got too close. We simply ruined our rig, getting back to the station to wash his jumpsuit.
Cooked diff oil. No contest there.
The smell of burnt transaxle fluid with accompanying smoke when driving our 2000 Windstar to work back in the day.
Mold, followed by decomposing French fries. Surprisingly the 2 year old Cheerios under the back seat of our car didn’t smell bad.
The Cheerios are probably still edible.
Bought a cheap 2001 Ford Explorer. Numerous tree Air Fresherners should have been a clue. After lots of interior cleaning finally pulled the interior. Found black licorice candy. The center console was made for Auto and Stick. Which left a hole in my automatic equipped center console. Smell wasn’t bad when cold. As vehicle warmed up the smell would intensify. Thorough cleaning of the metal and steam cleaning of the carpet and seats finally brought a neutral smell.
Eventually transmission started slipping. Gave the vehicle to a friend for the rear axle. He installed the rear 8.8 axle in his Jeep XJ.
Unburned hydrocarbons and various effluent from the early 1990s Oldsmobile/Pontiac/Buick (that is “running badly longer than most cars run at all”). The vaporized gas, engine oil, maybe some coolant; all going into my lungs… I can feel the brain cells dying.
I’m just the opposite. I would much rather be behind a carbureted big-block V8 muscle car from the ’60s and smelling unburned gasoline than be behind a new fuel injected Toyota with their catalytic converter stench. (Why is it Toyotas always smell the worst?)
I’m thinking more like 60° V6 with two bad spark plugs and a hole in the muffler… I’m sure that big-block V8 has a finely tuned carburetor ????
Not all of them. Some of them run pretty rich.
Taco bell after effects
I had an old Toyota pickup and forgot my fishing bag with the night crawlers inside.About 4 or 5 late May days later I went to use the truck and when I opened the door the smell was absolutely foul.Surprisingly it went away pretty quickly with the windows left open overnight but that was terrible.The smell of burning money every time I had to fix my daughter’s Avenger was pretty bad also.Last Dodge I’ll ever buy.
burnt clutch is a pretty bad smell
I did not see a single reference to ‘spilled baby formula’ which caused me to trade in a Mazda that I absolutely loved, although there were several ‘old milk’ stories that are roughly analygous to this, and kudos to the ‘2 large bullheads’.
Oh man. It wasn’t in the car, but I found a baby bottle that had been thrown/knocked into a corner. How long had it been there? I don’t know. But I’m cheap and decided to try cleaning it. I was not successful. That smell does not go away and I understand why you traded in the Mazda.
In general, I don’t mind most car smells. Huffing the odoriferous emanations from a car is like smelling your own farts – it’s more of a language conveying information about the state of the emitter that a offensive smell.
The result is that it doesn’t really get processed by the olfactory center of the brain as much as the language processing center, and therefore it doesn’t register in quite the same way as, say, the smell of fresh baked bread or baby diaper. My theory anyway.
That said, there’s one car smell that I absolutely despise. It makes me gag and simultaneously pisses me off because it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a particular type of adhesive that I’ve almost exclusively encountered on car vinyl graphics and bumper stickers that is unnecessarily disgusting and schnoz-stinging. I don’t know how to describe it or know of any pattern for what it is used on and what it isn’t. IYKYK
You ever have an opossum and a raccoon have a fight to the death in a car that goes unnoticed for a week or two while parked in the sun at a vacation house? I nominate that smell.
I don’t particularly love new car smell but old car smell like a jaguar or a
Porsche is pretty nice. By the way, the seats aren’t stuffed with horse hair they are stuffed with coconut husks.
There’s a certain type of grease that GM used around 2012 to lubricate the sun visor sliders. After baking in the hot Florida sun, sliding the sun visor in my moms 2012 traverse caused a sharp, putrid, stinging smell that is one of the worst “natural car smell” I’ve ever smelled. It was like old gear oil but sharper.