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The poet and writer Rudyard Kipling once said that \u201cSmells are surer than sounds or sights to make your heartstrings crack,\u201d and \u201c”The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” (the one who wrote the Jungle Books and tons of poetry that is rather neglected today, possibly because some of it\u2019s too much fun for an English class).\u00a0 He would probably have sympathised with those who find the smell of a brand new car intoxicating.<\/p>\n
Just what is that new car smell?\u00a0 Why does it press our buttons so much?\u00a0 And is it possible to bottle it so we can spray it in our old faithful Toyota Corollas<\/a> so they smell like new machines?\u00a0 If we can, should we?<\/p>\n For a start, some of the pleasure that we get from smelling a new car is partly down to pure primitive psychology and associations.\u00a0 The place in our brain where we process smells is right next-door to the memory department, so the two are pretty closely linked.\u00a0 The first time most of us smelt a new car would either have been when we were buying something brand new or when we were drooling around the car yards, admiring the machines we love.\u00a0 In the first case, the smell of a new car would probably thus be linked with the feelings of excitement, success and the joys of ownership.\u00a0 In the second case, the smell of a new car would be linked with the machines we dreamed of but could never afford.\u00a0 With such strong links between that smell and those strong feelings (aspiration and longing or else success), it\u2019s no wonder that we love new car smell.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a chance that we would love the new car smell even if it was awful, the same way that some people like the smell of tobacco because it reminds them of a beloved grandparent.\u00a0 The relationship between smell and emotion is a very complicated one, like emotions themselves.\u00a0 Scents that might put a smile on one person\u2019s face might break the heart of another and vice versa. If you were abruptly and rudely dumped in the middle of a fragrant rose garden by the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, the scent of roses would probably conjure up the feelings of bitterness for some time to come.\u00a0 Similarly, if you met the love of your life out on a fishing boat that stank of diesel and fish guts, the smell of diesel and fish guts would make your heart sing with the memory.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the case with new car smell?\u00a0 Is it something that we\u2019d find delicious if we smelled it in isolation from the car itself, rather like roses or cinnamon, or is it a fish-guts-and-diesel thing that we find pleasant because of the associations?<\/p>\n Just what is new car smell made up from? \u00a0Skipping the complex chemical names, most of what you can smell inside a new car comes from off-gassing from the materials inside the vehicle \u2013 the leather, the plastics, the vinyl, the glues, the rubber, the seat material and the paint.\u00a0 In a new car, all the volatile chemicals will still be off-gassing; in an older one, they\u2019ve all been used up.\u00a0 OK, to be fair, some of these notes are likely to be found in actual perfumes: Chanel No. 5 uses a lot of aldehyde notes and heaps of old-school aftershaves use leather notes.\u00a0 So it could be that new car smell is indeed intrinsically nice and it\u2019s not just the associations.<\/p>\n
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However, there\u2019s a sinister force at work.\u00a0 Back in 2000, research published by Australia\u2019s very own CSIRO (