This site is part of the What’s in the Air in Your Car?
Sometimes vehicles fail the sniff test. Ours did.
A while back, in the middle of a hot summer, we noticed a bad smell in our car. After cleaning out the car and checking the front grill and the undercarriage for road kill, I still couldn’t find the cause of the odor.
The smell got worse as the days passed, and we had to drive with the windows down wherever we went. We avoided offering anyone a ride.
At last I discovered the cause of the aroma, a half-full plastic milk bottle from an old McDonald’s Happy Meal pinched under the front seat.
Some smells in our cars, like this one, are simply unpleasant and bothersome. But various other odors can actually be dangerous to our health.
In the simply unpleasant category go smells from leftover fast food meals, from Rover, from the workout gear in the gym bag in the rear seat, from perspiration, and from crud brought in on our shoes, all more hazardous to our reputation and driving pleasure than to our health. Messy cars like this one frequently have unpleasant interior air quality.
Included in the equally fragrant unhealthy group are tobacco smoke, various pollutants, chemical air fresheners, and even that new car smell.
Johns Hopkins researchers measured and tested the air in smokers’ cars and concluded that the exposure to secondhand smoke lingers long after a cigarette has been extinguised. Anyone who breathes secondhand smoke is threatening their health, especially young children whose lungs are smaller and more delicate.
Many people find “new car smell” pleasant but that smell is actually the automotive aroma of fresh plastic, paint, acoustic insulation, wiring, glues, adhesives and sealers and upholstery. What most people don’t realize is that the smell comes from concentrations of toxic chemicals 5 – 10 times higher than those in homes or offices. Even older vehicles parked outside on very hot days off-gas some of these toxic smells.
The air flowing through the typical car interior is a long way from pure. It can contain gas and diesel exhaust fumes, various particles, smog, dust, pollen, and germs. You can add to that toxic vapors that come from the highway itself. The EPA has identified 21 toxic chemicals in highway air.
The quality of the vehicle air is an important issue not just from the standpoint of driving pleasure but from a health perspective. These days most people spend hours every day in their cars.
Rolling down the windows or putting the vent fan on high is no longer a satisfactory solution to these problems except in the most pristine environment due to outside air quality.
Ultimately, the best solution may be to use a portable vehicle air purifier that removes odors, tobacco smoke, toxic chemicals and other pollutants from interior vehicle air while you’re driving. There are various types available, several designed for convenient temporary mounting that plug into a vehicle’s auxiliary power port.
These days we all carry a toxic load of chemicals that we’ve absorbed from the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the products we use. So it’s also a good idea to periodically flush those toxins out through some method of detoxification.
