Mon, Oct 27, 2003 page12

• The Cadillac is back because of `new car' smell

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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 has engineered a scent for its vehicles and been processing it into their leather seats. The scent -- sort of sweet, sort of subliminal -- was created in a lab, 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 Embach, GM's advanced features manager. "You want it to smell like a Gucci bag."

  Automakers like GM are recasting cars, and particularly luxury vehicles, so that the things that potential buyers smell, hear and touch are increasingly the 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 Embach, adding that GM 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, which has helped bolster their quality rankings: Consider that the most frequent gripe among car buyers is that they hear too much wind noise.

  But even companies like Toyota engineer 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 Collins & 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 -- which makes its money reducing smells but 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.

  Embach, of GM, 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."

  Clotaire Rapaille, the founder of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, a consumer research firm in Boca Raton, Florida, that advises both the Big Three and the scent industry, said smell would not be the first impression a potential car buyer would have, but it could be a dealbreaker nonetheless. He likened it 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 SUV has more street credibility 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 super-sized version of the old Cadillac wreath and crest emblem.

  Then again, what if it was the smell?
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