About the air in there

[snopes]

Sliding inside almost any new car and taking a deep breath has long been euphoric for new car buyers and owners, but increasingly prompts the question whether that smell is also signaling exposure to a toxic, and potentially carcinogenic, brew of gases.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,1340948.story

[Pseudo_Croat]

So? They're probably present in such small amounts that it wouldn't be much of a health hazard anyway.

Remember, it's the dose that makes the poison.

- Pseudo_Croat

[Four Kitties]

Am I the only one who hates new car smell? It's always made me nauseous.

[FloridaGirl]

Originally Posted by Four Kitties

Am I the only one who hates new car smell? It's always made me nauseous.

I hate it too.

[Toys For Big Boys]

The smell of the X5 makes me feel ill. :upchuck:

[mags]

New car smell gives me migraines, like most outgassing.

[Alchemy]

Couple factors:

1) The problem isn't so much PVC by itself, but the fact that in a car you have large surface areas of material with volatile organic compounds which are placed inside a very small and practically airtight environment shortly after manufacture, and held there for weeks or months.

2) Our scent receptors are extremely responsive to aromatic compounds* (surprise surprise) and esters (pthalate plasticizers are both) so that a concentration of esters thousands of times smaller than what might cause you physical harm can be completely overpowering. (To the point your scent receptors trigger a migraine.) So just because the smell is horrible (and I agree it's unpleasant) does not neccessarily mean it's a health risk. For this reason I wish that the article actually went the extra step to hire someone to take a sample and determine the concentrations of these chemicals to see if they are actually dangerous. From the reading of the article, I wonder if this was done, and the concentrations were not given *because* they were so incredibly low.


*Simple aromatic compounds are often pretty dangerous. Benzene, toluene, and xylene (BXT) are generally bad news and if you can smell them there's reason to be concerned.