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
Nope – sorry everyone is wrong (unless I missed someone else saying it.) Its clearly, and specifically, Lost Milk. Like the variety spilt somewhere in the minivan by a 4 year old that you can never find or clean, but are doomed to smell until you sell.
Old gear oil is probably up there for normal things. The smell alot the HVAC systems get now isn’t pleasant and is apparently normal now. I’ve never liked the smell of boiling antifreeze. It’s always made me sick to my stomach. Rotting food or animals is up there always vomit inducing. Milk and milkshakes spilled under seats can be a quite a bad deal that is very hard to deal with.
Smell produced by a vehicle: rancid gear oil or old motorcycle fork oil.
Smell produced in a car: beer and bongwater (I installed a lot of cheaper car stereos in the day), once did a FB RX7 and had to change my clothes after..
As a teenager I was lavishly sick down the air vent of my dad’s car. After that, the car exhibited an intense parfum de vom every time the heating was turned on. It was a relief when my mum wrote it off (she was fine).
In no particular order:
The last one might actually be the worst, but I can’t say for sure because my brain suppressed the memory of that smell. Which tells you something about how bad it was in the moment.
Also, pro tip: Before you start spraying vinegar and pure vanilla (and any other bad scent remedies you might come across) around trying to get rid of the smell, make sure you Lysol the everliving sh!t out of any surface that came in contact with contaminated fluid. If you haven’t killed the bacteria the smell will never go away. Not that I learned that the hard way or anything. 😉
This reminded me of the washer reservoir that was missing a cap when I first got my Saab and had a ton of things to fix on it (I still have a bunch of things to fix on it). Every time I used the washers it smelled horrific. I replaced the nozzles that were all broken, then I went to replace the pumps at the base of the reservoir and thought ‘oh there are a bunch of rotting leaves in here they must have fallen in because the cap was missing’, and pulled them out with my bare hand. Except, it wasn’t leaves, it was a dead mouse. The stench of death hit me so hard in that moment, and I washed my hands probably 15 times trying to get the smell and feel off of me. As an experience, I do not recommend it!
Ford Friction Modifier for the 8.8 LSD rear end. Just having a sealed bottle of it in my car for half of a hot day in Los Angeles was too much.
Imagine if you will – 4 teen boys, post hockey practice, with their gear, in a small SUV. I don’t care if it is 25 degrees out – we are driving with the windows down!
On the other hand when I lived on Manhattan’s upper east side, a bus full of the Brearley field hockey team was pretty wonderful.
Burnt, overheated automatic transmission fluid. Hate that smell.
when i was a kid my parents had a Ford Cortina station wagon. they put sheepskin rugs in the bag, which us kids used to sleep on, on car trips. they both smoked like chimneys back then, so those sheepskins absorbed a lot of smoke. thinking of the smell still leaves me retching, 40 years later…
Objectively terrible smelling? Anything left in a car while it sits in impound lots. I’ve crawled through enough cars at Coparts and the like where whatever meal was in the car when it got towed was still in there months later when I showed up, just with the added benefit of additional baking cycles inside the car.
Worst to me? All early and mid 2000’s Kias had interiors that smelled like melted crayons. I never had one, but I got my fill driving in friends’ cars and any other ones I was tasked with repairing. Those smell memories still haunt me to this day.
Axle oil. I hate it sooo much. Engine oil is fine.
Old old used car oil, I had a TR3 engine fall over in my V70 and dump 20 year old stale oil- I tossed out all the carpet and the car stank for months, dead mice are a good second
This one isn’t specifically a “car” smell, but I suppose it could theoretically be. Last year, after one of the hurricanes, I went to help a colleague in St. Petersburg, Florida, move their stuff out of their hurricane-flooded house. Because there was a sewage treatment plant nearby, many people in that area got the pleasure of extra-nasty water in their homes. I will never, ever, ever forget that smell. And I was there only a day after the actual flooding happened – I can’t even imagine what it would have smelled like a couple of days later. As a lot of cars got flooded, I suppose buyers at Copart got a good whiff of that smell, and especially the unsuspecting subsequent buyers of those “rust-free Florida cars” after the used car lot chemical smell wore off.
Dead mice, especially if they’re in a place where the HVAC system can pump the stench into the cabin.
Second place: dead mice covered with whatever unholy fake floral spray the dealership absolutely douses everything with after locating the aforementioned mice.
Can confirm.
If you’re lucky the dead mice just desiccate.
mouse piss, on the other hand…
have MIL’s Camry interior stripped out. Dealer cleaned the vents and it actually worked, but they peed on every soft surface. The smell of the carpet pad on the firewall was incredible.
Gear oil for sure.
Having a kid who leaves sweaty cleats in the car to bake in the Florida sun, I go with feet being the worst smell.
Nothing “bakes” in the Florida sun. It boils.
Had the same experience with the converter on my Omni.
The converter was removed the next day.
But the smell persisted for a few months at least.
Though not the WORST automotive smell, certainly the tale of the “Chowder Boat” needs retelling.
My friend Andrew, who I have now been friends with for nearly 50 years, parents had that dreamboat of an American car, a ’70-something Volare station wagon. In fetching black with fake bark, slant 6 and automatic. Back in our high school years, Mama-Andrew whipped up a big pot of fish chowder, stowed it in the “way back” of the family truckster, and headed off over hill and dale to Grandma’s house with it for some mid-winter family event. On one particular hill or dale, said pot of chowder tipped over and flooded the poor Volare’s nether regions. Hurriedly somewhat cleaned up, but plenty was missed and of course in the dead of a Maine winter – froze solid. Which was FINE until spring came. And then the remaining chowder melted. And to say the car had a distinct odor about it would be the understatement of the ’80s.
Mama Andrew quickly found herself a new car (a bright red 2dr K-car LeBaron, as it happens), and the soon dubbed Chowder Boat was handed down to Andrew and his slightly younger brother, who had both recently become licensed drivers. Many high school hijinks ensued in that poor abused thing until the tin worm put it out of it’s misery about the time we graduated. Andrew’s driving technique was a testament to the inherent robustness of the slant 6, to say the least. Lacking a tach, his usual method of extracting what performance the thing had was to hold the lower gears, put foot firmly to the firewall and shift up only once the roof rack would start rattling in concert with the moaning six!
Good times!
I carried home a gallon of milk in the back floorboard of my Mustang. Didn’t realize it leaked, and it was summertime. The interior REEKED after the milk started spoiling, took me a while to figure out what it was.
The day I left for a week-long business trip, I ran to the store for milk. Then my wife drove me to the airport.
When I got to my destination, I called my wife and told her that the milk was still in the trunk, please get it out quick and get it in the fridge. “Ok, honey.”
This was in August.
A week later I went to my car, opened the driver’s door, and gagged from the stench. Opened the trunk. Effing gallon of milk EXPLODED into the fiber trunk lining and then rotted in the contained moisture of the trunk.
It’s a tie between opening the car door to a wet interior that’s been marinating in the sun for a day and burning clutch.
Someone once asked how do you tell the difference between burning clutch and cooked brakes. “The clutch smells more expensive”
Three of my own, one belonging to a former acquaintance (bf of a friend/co-worker).
1) “Honey, have you seen the 3-lb package of chicken breasts? I know I grabbed one and it’s here on the receipt but I’ve searched high-and-low and it’s nowhere to be found!”
~me, digging through the back of my two-kid supporting, just returned from a camping trip suburban. In July.
But he neither looked high nor low, now did he, for the chicken revealed itself a mere two weeks later…
2) used motor oil spilled onto hot exhaust header. My buddy had free cars and oil in high school (his family owned a junkyard) so other than the occasional gallon or two of gas he never spent a penny on his rides (cars, tires, gas, oil – all free for the foraging! Something about the extra-baked-in PAHs, weird Zn compounds, and some amount of brake fluid, Raid, and whatever else got into the collection tanks was heady indeed.
3) oddly enough, a bottle of red wine that froze and exploded in the backseat of my first proper MI winter in 2002 or 3. Once summer came around the backseat could, at any given time, faithfully mimic a) a wink/my grandfather, b) freshly picked berries, c) corked wine, and d) the perfume my high school girlfriend wore a decade and a half before. It wasn’t always terrible :).
Friend’s dumb-ass BF’s (FDABF) olfactory horror.
Running the Friday fish fry at the Eagles’ club. Got drunk on rum and started talking shit to everybody so half the place left and left him with about 30 lbs of just fried fish. Rather than take the time to package them all up, chill em down, and get them home over the next whatever, he threw all of the serving trays *and* a just cooled cauldron of cooking oil into the back of his Astro and tore out of there.
He ditched it about 1/4 mile from the house so he walked home and slept it off. The combination of a hot night, all that fish, and all that fishy oil combined into a melange that was equal parts long john silver’s (chippy for the Brits), a proper fish market, and a good solid mass beaching of some kinda fish. He power washed the interior, steam cleaned, used every cleaner he could find – nothing barely touched the horror. I saw him driving with his windows down a time or two and then the Astro disappeared from the parking lot at work, never to be seen again.
Shame, too. He loved that van – we all did. It was really clean, super handy, and up to that point, well-cared for. I guy was that’s why they say never mix rum and fish…
A mixture of Jack Daniel’s puke (mine) and English Blazer cologne (my cousin’s, used in an attempt to cover the puke smell).
Using cologne to attempt to cover up some nasty smell almost always results in something worse than what you started with. Plenty of drunk shenanigans in college to attest to (in the ’00s, so “cologne” was Axe spray). So now it smells like puke AND a middle school locker room.
Come to think of it, there was a perking lot attendant that worked at the parking lot at the intersection of Great Jones and Lafayette streets. You could smell his cologne from about a block and a half away.
That counts as an automotive smell, right?
My mom was an Avon lady in the 80s. Her ’83 Camry (5 speed manual!) had this stench of perfumes and other Avon products, and on many a hot day, I puked out the window, or one time onto a map book that she cleaned and continued using for several years with its wrinkly pages.
Butter.