How do Nissan factories create their “own” new car smell?

People love the 'new car smell'.

And for most cars and SUVs, it's a mix of plastic, stain-resistant fabrics and maybe some actual leather as well.

It is a complex olfactory chorus of scents that elicits an emotional response.

And at car companies like Nissan, there are professionals whose job is to carefully smell and make sure each new car has the unique new car smell.

There are a lot of requirements on the materials used inside the car - they should last for years, they should be easy to clean, withstand temperature extremes, etc. - so expecting it to smell good is a lot more demanding.


But those tough demands are why automakers hire people like Tori Curl, a materials engineer at Nissan Technical Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Torey oversees a team of scent experts who carefully analyze the scents of everything that goes inside vehicles such as the Nissan Pathfinder SUV and Frontier Pickup.  

Since Curl is originally a plastics materials engineer, which partly makes up the majority of the materials inside the non-luxury car, she was soon given overall responsibility for the way Nissan's cars smell inside.

"Every time we launch a vehicle, we have to test its smell," she says emphatically.

So while developing a new model, Curl and her team are testing and sniffing individual car parts, such as steering wheels, seat cushions and visors, before putting them in the car to make sure they smell pleasant — or at least harmless.


It's then put in the car, and then you say "We sit in the car and make sure that, while we're sitting in the driver's seat, and you're sitting in the back seat, you smell the good new car." 


And the smells in the front seat can be very different from the smells in the back seat.

In the front seat, there is a much larger selection of materials near the nose.

Besides the leather or cloth seats, there are plastics on the dashboard.

There are also all bonding materials, threads, and adhesives that hold these things together.

In the back seat, you are surrounded by seat material only.

There are seats in front of you, behind you, and under you.

Then there is the smell of the carpet underfoot.


Even though all of the car's components, at that point, had been pre-smelled before being fitted into a prototype car, there were still surprises.

As with cooking, some smells that are fine, or even very pleasant, can change on their own when combined with other substances.

Or sometimes when there is a scent that has been somehow overlooked in all of the previous smells.


Next, Curl's team has to start an investigation.

According to CNN, she and her team members are all "certified smellers" or "certified smell experts."

(There is training and certification that includes smell recognition tests that are carefully done.) And they begin their investigations the same way you would try to find a strange smell in your car.

They systematically sniff every inch of the car's interior to narrow down the source of the foul odor.

A sudden bad smell in a fully assembled vehicle is often because the supplier changed some aspect of how the part was made.

In this case, Curl said it will work with the supplier to find what has changed and see if the problem can be fixed.


Because a person's sense of smell can change over time, even day in and day out, professional scents are regularly re-certified through blind smell tests.

They are provided with unlabeled vials of different scents and asked to identify each one.


Because attitudes toward scents vary from culture to culture, Curl's work focuses on cars intended for North American customers.

Car buyers in Europe and Asia may not fully appreciate the scent Americans find attractive.

They may prefer no smell at all.

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