Quick Hit: That Old New Car Smell

Tired of trying to make your new jeans look "old"? Consider making your old car smell "new."

AMONG THE varieties of air fresheners — the lemons, the peaches, the strawberries, the mints — that you can buy to combat malodorous miscreants inside your car, there is available for purchase an odd little packet called "Car Freshner Little Trees New Car Scent" (no, "Freshner" is not a typo). The reverse of the packaging tells us, with entertaining enthusiasm, that this is one of their "exquisite fragrance blends." Paging Chanel.

Little Trees, it seems, makes all manner of air fresheners, from “Blackberry Clove” to “Wild Hemp.” But this one, they say, will help you "recapture that new-car feeling."

Which produces the following questions:

1. What exactly does a new car smell like? It's more complicated than you think, and not entirely healthy, apparently. Think eau de polymer. Click here (and here for you deep-divers). “The classic new-car smell,” Car & Driver wrote in 2021, “is a byproduct of a chemical process known as off-gassing—a term that doesn’t sound particularly appealing. The root cause is attributable to the many plastics and adhesives used in a modern car's interior.”

2. Why would you desire the deeply industrial, and pugnaciously artificial, smell of "new car" in your not-so-new car — and why would you want to make it happen artificially? Particularly when side effects of the actual new-car smell can include nausea, sore throats and headaches.

3. Most saliently, why are you trying to make your not-so-new car smell, to passengers and ostensibly yourself, like a new car? It can't be a deception thing, because anyone who rides in it over time (including you) will know it's not new. And if it's not a particularly enticing smell, then why use it at all?

The only possible reason I can think of is that the notion of owning a new car is so coveted and psychically calming — such a tonic to a driver — that s/he is willing to fool herself/himself on a subconscious level into concluding, olfactorily (is that a word?), that there's some hint of newness attached to the old family jalopy.

For the obsessed: Little Trees also sells Freshner-adjacent products such as a backpack, a baseball hat and a notebook. Not to mention a “Collector’s Edition Box” of 40 freshener trees with all the flavors included.

There’s also an “America” variety, which has what’s perhaps an even more mind-boggling scent than New Car: “America Xtra Strength.”

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THE SMELL TEST

The scent of the New Car tree is best described as the air-freshener equivalent of the equally non-organic "blue raspberry" Slurpee. It's vaguely citrusy, vaguely aquatic, with subtle undertones of polymer and Chevrolet Service Center waiting room. The fact that its delivery system is shaped like a tree is richly ironic, given that this scent could not, would not, should not occur in nature.

I have hung it in my study, which I have high hopes will shortly smell something like ... a new car.