‘New car smell’ is fading away as regulators clean up cabins

The ‘new car smell’ is on its way out, as regulatory bodies turn their attention to airborne chemicals emitted by plastics, glues, textiles and other materials that make up car interiors, pressuring manufacturers to adopt purer, odourless alternatives.

Eight substances that commonly diffuse from car interiors, particularly in the early stages of cars’ lives, have been identified as having an adverse effect on occupants. Dubbed volatile organic compounds (VOCs), they are: acetaldehyde, acrolein, benzene, ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, styrene, toluene and xylene.

Their scents can induce allergy-like reactions in some people, such as eye irritation, sneezing, dizziness, shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea and headaches, and their strength varies with the car’s exposure to heat and light.

“It doesn’t just evaporate and then disappear,” said Nick Molden, CEO of testing company Emissions Analytics. “It will evaporate into the cabin and then, in the evening, when it cools down, it will be reabsorbed by the surfaces.

“And it will re-evaporate again the next day, so when you mix it all up in a sort of VOC soup, then expose it to sunlight, you basically have a biosphere of VOCs, which can last quite a long time.”

Symptoms are reported most frequently in Asia. A 2005 survey of 800 new car buyers by South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport found that 51.5% experienced at least one sensation of what it termed ‘sick car syndrome’, leading the country to establish local standards for VOCs in 2007. Similar initiatives exist in Japan and Russia.

Interior smell is consistently cited as one of the biggest complaints, if not the biggest, among new car buyers in Chinese JD Power owner satisfaction surveys, and China introduced its voluntary GB/T 27630-2011 “guideline for air quality assessment of passenger cars” in 2012, which covers testing methods and maximum interior emissions.

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