Adding odors to new cars

[Guest guest]

Here's a New York Times article about car manufactures purposely adding odors to cars to make them more attractive. Those of us who are chemically sensitive and care about those who are chemically sensitive should write the New York Times and these manufacturers and express ourselves a bit!!

October 25, 2003

New Luxury-Car Specifications: Styling. Performance. Aroma.

By DANNY HAKIM

DETROIT, Oct. 24 — For Cadillac, the new-car smell, that ethereal scent of factory freshness, is no longer just a product of chance.

General Motors recently revealed that its Cadillac division had engineered a scent for its vehicles and had been processing it into the leather seats. The scent — sort of sweet, sort of subliminal — was created in a lab, was picked by focus groups and is now the aroma of every new Cadillac put on the road.

It even has a name. Nuance.

"You pay the extra money for leather, you don't want it to smell like lighter fluid," said T. Embach, G.M.'s manager for advanced features. "You want it to smell like a Gucci bag."

Automakers like G.M. are recasting cars, and particularly luxury vehicles, so that the things that potential buyers smell, hear and touch are increasingly a result of engineering rather than chance.

Ford's Lincoln now uses light- emitting diodes to bathe its sport utilities in a white nighttime interior glow; Volkswagen uses bluish backlighting. General Motors is bringing an Australian sports car to America as a reborn Pontiac GTO muscle car, with a computer-designed roar for the previously quiet engine.

No sense can be taken for granted.

"For many years, we ignored the olfactory sense," said Mr. Embach, adding that G.M. has been expanding Nuance across the Cadillac line for several years and is now considering adding it to Buicks.

Certainly, there are different schools of thought about what stimulates customers the right way. Asian automakers tend to focus on eliminating sounds and smells, and that has helped bolster their quality rankings: consider that the most frequent complaint among car buyers is that they hear too much wind noise.

But even companies like Toyota Motor engineer in sounds they think people want to hear. It recently overhauled the tone of the Camry's horn from a bright and friendly pitch to a more macho bark for the American market. Engineering the new-car smell is at the industry's sensory frontier.

Such is the new-car smell's mystique that it can be bought in aerosol form. But thus far, the focus inside the car has been on odor elimination, partly in an effort to remove some fumes that studies have shown can be toxic.

But some see signs of a much broader sensory manipulation ahead in Cadillac's efforts.

The auto supplier & Aikman has a division that specializes in "aroma quality management" — a picture of a big nose hangs in the lobby of the company's headquarters in the Detroit suburbs. The operation makes its money reducing smells, but it is pitching carmakers on adding them.

During a recent visit to one of the company's labs, Siying Chen, a chemist whose skills would not have been needed in the industry a decade ago, opened a clear jar containing a rubber strip and waved her hand to sweep up the bouquet of what smelled like fine leather.

Could she make plastic smell more like leather than leather?

"Of course," she said, and offered up a swatch of plastic that both felt and smelled like leather.

The new-car smell need not stop at leather, however. "We believe there is growth potential in people wanting to be in this big burly S.U.V. with rich walnut and they want it to smell like wood," said Jeff Rose, senior vice president at & Aikman.

Wood perfume would be needed, he explained, because wood parts are so heavily lacquered that they "don't even smell like wood."

Naturally, there is skepticism.

"We're more about the driving experience," said Von Hooydonk, the president of Designworks USA, BMW's North American design operation.

"We test our cars in all sorts of weather conditions. The interior, if you put it in the sun for a few days, whatever is in there, the solvents or glues, will smell," he added. "And we don't want them to smell bad. But beyond that, I'm not aware of us trying to tweak it into a specific direction."

While European automakers are puzzled about creating smells, they are not oblivious to the senses. They can be obsessive about engineering the right engine sound, for example.

Likewise, Ford used computers to generate, and focus groups to confirm, a signature rumble for the engine of its redesigned F-150 pickup truck.

Once Ford had its sound, it asked its largest supplier, Visteon, to find a way to get the pickup's engine to make it. "They came to us and said, `We have a sound that we want to hear,' " said Greg Green, a manager in Visteon's air induction department. " `We want you to fine-tune the engine so we get that sound.' "

Visteon added four resonators to the engine's intake system. The devices, which cost a few dollars apiece, produce sound waves tailored to cancel certain sound waves from the engine, peeling back excess white noise to reveal what Mr. Green called "a classic V-8 sound."

Mr. Embach of G.M. said Cadillac's smell project began a decade ago, when the company experimented with various manufactured scents. Different luxury cars have long been characterized by the smell of their leathers, but changes were made "by the tanner based on his or her own nose."

"The new-car smell was a smell by default," he said. "It wasn't designed or engineered."

To test its scents, the company brought 340 Cadillac owners together in Houston, presented them with six different Cadillacs and asked them for their impressions of the interiors. Five of the otherwise identical interiors were imbued with different scents and a sixth was a Cadillac in the buff, so to speak.

The owners were asked about everything but smell and they favored the car scented with what would be dubbed Nuance.

"We didn't even want to tip our hands that this was about aromas," said Mr. Embach, whose research has also included sniffing dozens of prototype cars at Detroit's annual auto show.

Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, the founder of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, a consumer research firm in Boca Raton, Fla., that advises both the Big Three and the scent industry, said that smell would not be the first impression that a potential car buyer would have, but it could be a deal breaker nonetheless.

He likened the situation to finding out that a beautiful date had bad breath.

"I'm not going to buy a car because of the smell only, I'll buy it because of the look, the identity and the message," he said. "But then I'll get in the car, and smell can be a turnoff."

Considering that the rise of Nuance has roughly coincided with the resuscitation of the Cadillac brand — no S.U.V. has more street cred than the Cadillac Escalade — there is a question here. Most analysts credit the brand's distinctive new designs, which feature hard edges and bold grills and a supersize version of the old reliable Cadillac wreath and crest emblem.

Then again, what if it was the smell?