Ford employees, from left to right, Sandra Edwards, Michael Kelly, Swati Saini, Bharat Soni, Carrie Strollings and Jeff LaDuke test smells for new Ford vehicles. (Ford)
When engineers were getting Ford's Transit Connect ready to go on sale in the U.S. last year, some of them noticed an oily, fishy odor in the van.
Ford staffers in Turkey, where the Transit Connect is made, were stumped. They hadn't noticed the scent. But a team of U.S. engineers could smell it, and they went to work stripping down the van's interior until they found the culprit: a sealant used in the doors. Ford has switched to a new sealant that won't offend American noses.
In the highly competitive auto industry, no detail can be overlooked. That includes odors.
Ford, Toyota, General Motors and other companies have trained teams of sniffers who evaluate scents and reject or reformulate any unpleasant materials. It's a daunting task. Car interiors are made of dozens of odorous materials -- plastics, foams, rubbers, carpet, fabric, leather.
Cultural differences
- Andrea Sterling, a smell-panel leader for Toyota in the United States, says Americans are more sensitive to "fishy" odors than Japanese, so Japanese engineers have been trained to meet U.S. standards for "fishiness." On the other hand, Japanese testers found the scent from some natural fibers much more offensive than Americans did.
- There's no scent that Sandra Edwards, head of Ford's smell-test team, can think of that everyone likes. American and European drivers think leather smells luxurious, for example, but Indian drivers don't like it.
"The goal is for you to not smell anything, because different people are going to like different things," says Sandra Edwards, a Ford laboratory engineer who leads a smell-test team at the automaker. "If there's no scent whatsoever, everyone's going to be happy."
Smell tests have taken on added importance with the globalization of the car market: Different cultures have different sensitivities. Ford's smell panel has international participants to ensure it gets a variety of opinions.
"America has such a sanitized atmosphere to it, it doesn't take much for us to pick up on those odors," Edwards says.
At Ford, smell tests are run on new parts. Five testers are picked from a pool in Edwards' department, and they smell samples that have been placed in Mason jars with water or heat, which intensify odors. Testers assign numbers to the scents, from one (no odor) to six (strong and disturbing).
Negative tests can force engineers to scrap a part and start over. When Toyota was designing the new Sienna minivan, engineers planned to use a certain foam block as a dampening cushion in the cup holder. But the foam didn't pass the smell test, so materials engineers worked with design engineers and the supplier to find an alternative.
Sometimes, automakers or suppliers will try to reformulate the part to change the odor. In one recent instance, Ford's team determined that some rubber floor mats smelled unpleasant. The supplier tried adding cinnamon oil to mask the scent. Unfortunately, that was rejected, too.
"It smelled like cinnamon and rubber," Edwards says. "It was pretty comical."
Andrea Sterling, an engineer and smell-panel leader for Toyota in the United States, says many people believe that automakers add something to create that "new-car smell." But it just comes from chemicals in the materials.
Plasticizers, for example, are chemicals added to plastic to make it more durable and easier to mold into the dashboard and other shapes. Eventually, the chemicals evaporate and the odors go away.
"Even the smell of roses comes from the chemicals that the plant releases into the air," Sterling says. "Just like roses, plastics, adhesives and other materials have some chemicals in them that are released into the air and are recognized by our noses."
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