Our Two Cents: Least Favorite Automotive Smells
A promise was made in our last installment of Our Two Cents, and today that promise is kept. It’s only natural to ponder the worst automotive smells after discussing the ones that most satisfy your nose. Sometimes you gotta take the bad with good, as cars are always a mixed blessing. It’s the contrast between the sweet aroma of certain gasolines and putrid 90-weight gear oil. Or the smell of a new car with a cheap interior versus one with really expensive bits and decadent leather trimmings.
So that’s how we kicked the question back to the staff here at Hagerty Media. Let’s see what are their least favorite automotive smells!
Interiors
“The VW Jetta (Mk IV) crayon smell in the interior: GROSS! Why? Because it’s just that unpleasant!” – Matt Tuccillo
“For me it was toxic new Hyundai smell from the 1990s. I wanted to enjoy seeing South Korean cars getting better and better (looking at you, Hyundai Scoupe) firsthand, so I’d try to check them out at the annual auto show. It took serious commitment to do so, even with the windows down. ” – Sajeev Mehta
“Faux leather that hasn’t finished off-gassing, a smell we recently experienced in a press car. Come on now, go cow or go home!” – Grace Houghton
Critters
“The smell of mouse encampments in spring after you so diligently tried to prevent them the previous autumn.”- Eddy Eckart
“The easy answer here is ancient rear differential oil. And it’s not just the stink, it’s that it seemingly never goes away, especially on clothing. However, there is not a single thing on earth that smells worse than cleaning rotten animal guts off the underside of a vehicle.
Thankfully, I have only had to do this twice. To clarify, I was not the one who ran over the already very much deceased animal in the middle of the road, but when that vehicle comes home to park in my driveway, I am the one that had to clean it!” – Ben Woodworth
Rental Cars
“Diesel exhaust. And most rental cars.” – Cameron Neveu
“And the backseat of every Uber.” – Sajeev Mehta
“Hey Sajeev, are we graduating this from smells to stains?” – Matt Tuccillo
“Oops, my bad. Ubers are bad because of the stains paired with the masking smells of car air fresheners. You can see the sins but you can’t quite smell them anymore.” – Sajeev Mehta
“We once had a Camaro convertible rental car in Colorado for a Barn Find Hunter shoot many years ago. (I got a convertible to shoot video from while wandering through the mountains). Had the top down when we got it at the airport. We put the top up when we stopped for lunch in Denver since we had some camera gear in there.
An hour or so in the hot, Colorado sun left us a nice surprise when we returned to the car. The thing smelled like vomit. Like, so bad the whole car may as well have been filled with vomit. It was awful. We quickly removed our things (while holding our breath), called the rental agency and told them to bring us a new car.”- Ben Woodworth
Cigarette Smoke
“I was a kid who grew up riding in the back seats of cars driven by cigarette-smoking adults, and that nauseating smell is unshakable because not only is it in the upholstery and carpeting and headliner, it quickly gets in your clothes and hair. These days, any time I get into a car that has been smoked in (which is not often, thankfully) I try to breathe through my mouth to avoid it.” – Stefan Lombard
Grab Bag
“Fire, for obvious reasons.” – Andrew Newton
“What about the smell of, “Huh, I wonder what that smell is? It’s probably fine.” – Ben Woodworth
“Trapped farts.” – Molly Jean
Gear Oil
“The answer is, obviously, diff oil. Sweaty gym sock filled with goose droppings, left overnight in a neglected bathhouse. Gives me chills just thinking about it.” – Eric Weiner
“Differential oil. Look at a picture of an axle draining diff: Can you smell it? I bet you can. Cam’s entry of diesel exhaust is up there too. I’m talking like an old indirect injected machine, that smell just gets in your clothes and takes a while to come out. Or a coal rolling tune on a bro dozer pickup. . .no thanks.” – Greg Ingold
Any smell that smells like trouble ! Coolant (as someone mentioned) means I have to deal with hoses or the radiator. Burning brake pads. Burning clutch. Burning wire insulation (Lucas, alas). A whiff of any of these puts me on high alert.
The odor of a burned out automatic transmission might be the worst. I used to rebuild transmissions and one that has burned the clutches and overheated puts out a stench that remains in the shop for days after the transmission is gone. By comparison, gear oil is almost pleasant. BTW, remember GMs grape scented gear oil?
I absolutely love the interior smell of my 1988 Volkswagen Jetta brings back so many good memories!
Old broken safety glass. I just removed some old broken, and cracked, door glass from my 1957 Chevy and as I broke it down further to fit it into a box the smell was WAY worse than any other car smell I’ve experienced.
If you are an MG collector, the worst smell is lucas electrical smoke.
Castrol ‘R’ …I could sniff all day!
Get yourself an ozone generator. These magical devices can remove smells from every car interior.
How about that chicken you brought last week but forgot about it in the trunk!
A friend of mine had an old Corvair convertible with (gasp!) a missing headliner. Whatever that stuffing was stunk something awful and made my nose run.
Oil burning cars, when you get stuck in traffic behind one, all you can think is where is the next trun off.
Driving behind a car with an improperly adjusted smog system….what a gawd-awful stink!
100% agree with old gear oil hitting the top 3 bad smells (ok, I put it in the top 3 myself). In 1987 I destroyed the differential in my ‘84 Celica from axel hop in a snow storm. Laying under that car on my in-law’s driveway in January to install a used third member with gear oil in my hair is a very poignant moment. I still get a gag reflex on the smell.
The worst smell by far is one where a person died in the car and wasn’t found for a few days. The body may be removed but the smell will never go away.
This is a little bet strange. In 1965 when I was young and worked for a Buick dealer, a guy was murdered in a nearly brand new 1965 LeSabre and left in the car for several days. They went and brought the car in with a wrecker and took it to the trim shop across the street. You could smell that car from 5-6 feet away. The trim shop replaced I think all the unholstery in the car and used some kind of machine to neutralize the odor. I guess the insurance company then sold the car.
That brand new Corvette Stingray way back in the day that the owner died in but wasn’t found for two weeks and the car was later for sale for, like, five hundred bucks but nobody would buy it because you couldn’t get the smell out. It even might have had one of those 200 mpg carburetors too … ok, just kidding.