Everyone jokes about New Car Smell — most of which is fresh volatiles from plastic, rubber, and adhesive (and thus not terribly healthy for you), but it’s always been considered something of a joke that someone should market little aerosol cans of the stuff.
Well, the next best thing seems to be tailoring the New Car smell on upscale Cadillacs to be just what people subliminally want from a new vehicle.
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 James T. Embach, G.M.’s manager for advanced features. “You want it to smell like a Gucci bag.”
The article also notes how the sights and sounds of cars are also being much more carefully crafted (or varied by market) to fit certain marketing expectations.