Can you bottle that new car smell? Adam Hay-Nicholls goes on a scent tour of the Cotswolds in the new Omoda 7 hybrid electric vehicle

Could you bottle that ‘new car smell’, you’d be on to a winner. That’s the bracing odour of a bold financial decision. That odour is a cocktail of volatile organic compounds: leather, plastic, carpets, seals, coatings and adhesives. A virginal interior untouched by cigarette smoke, damp dogs, BO and takeaway food.

This fresh yet slightly chemical scent has a powerful psychological component. It’s associated with anticipation and reward: collecting your shiny new vehicle, peeling the plastic covers from the seats, seeing the odometer turn over its first miles, knowing that you’re the first and only name in the log book. 

Cars and smells have history together

Cars and smells have history together: there’s a whole subgenre of the auto industry dedicated to creating olfactory delights. The most likely place to find them is in your dad’s Christmas stocking. Car-branded colognes date back to 1988 with the launch of Ferrari Cuvée and Jaguar for Men. Both had an unmistakable whiff of Filofax and red braces about them. Jaguar’s perfume had a brisk green citrus opening that gave way to nutmeg before settling into oakmoss, cedarwood and tobacco. Basically, imagine an XJS sliding into a ditch, hitting a tree and spilling its ashtray. Ferrari’s effort was darker and earthier than the Jaguar pong, with spiciness, balsamic vinegar, leather and musk. 

The trade in car colognes is still going strong today. Ferrari, Jaguar, Bentley, BMW, Aston Martin, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Lamborghini all have bottles to sell you. Some are surprisingly well-priced compared to the cost of the four-wheeled product. Ferrari’s Scuderia Black and Bentley’s Azure for Men are priced at £45 and £59 respectively. Lamborghini went the other route, partnering with Xerjoff to create a fragrance that retails for a whopping £331. 

These eaux de toilette are of course designed for the skin, not the dashboard. But we’re living in a brave new world, one in which you can now tailor the way your car smells to better suit your mood. Mercedes, as it so often is, was the first manufacturer to feature a built-in fragrance diffuser. Having previously ushered in anti-lock brakes, the airbag, electronic stability programming (ESP), adaptive cruise control and pre-tightening seatbelts, the latest innovation in the top-of-the-range S-Class is an air conditioning system that can make your car smell better. 

All of which brings us to the Omoda 7, one of the latest Chinese cars to reach our shores and the second after the Merc to have a built-in fragrance bar. The difference is that the Omoda costs three-and-a-half times less than its sweet-scented German rival. The 7 SHS-P (which stands for Super Hybrid System Plug-in) is priced between £32,005 and £35,505 depending on the spec, compared to £112,000 for the Merc. 

It’s a mid-size family SUV – what they call ‘C-segment’ in the biz – and is poised to steal customers from Volkswagen’s Tiguan, which is a little smaller, a little less powerful, and a whole ten grand more expensive. The VW just smells like a new car; there’s no added patchouli or sandalwood. 

My fragrant journey in the Omoda would take me in convoy from SW1 to Devon’s Lympstone Manor, then via Somerset and Wiltshire’s A-roads to Bath and on to the Thyme Hotel in the Cotswolds, before returning to central London 48 hours later. The 450-mile drive would be completed using just two-thirds of a tank of fuel. 

I collected the 7 SHS-P from St James’s Square following a heavy nose session at Floris, where I learned all about smells. This Jermyn Street institution has been a constant since 1730, making it the oldest independent family-run perfumer in the land. It found favour with the aristocracy; Floris let me thumb through weighty ledgers that were nearly a century old, detailing the customer information of George VI and the Queen Mother, the Duke of Windsor and Elizabeth II. I don’t suppose they went in for GDPR back then. Other Floris devotees included Sir Winston Churchill, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. 

After much sniffing and wafting, I settled upon Special No.127, a refreshing citrus blend of bergamot and orange, lavender and geranium, neroli, white patchouli and musk, a combination that could pass as dessert at one of Richard Caring’s establishments. It was created in 1890 for Russia’s Prince Orloff and later found favour with Churchill and Eva Peron. 

Round the corner I get my first chance to really take in the Omoda 7’s exterior. There’s a lot of talk about noses in this piece, and the Omoda’s is notable in that there’s very little going on. Its broad, borderless grille dissolves into the bumper like an oversized version of the ‘egg crate’ grille first seen on the Ferrari Roma, which has become a design trend du jour. It leaves a clean and EV-like expanse between the Omoda’s razor-thin headlights. There’s no great chrome moustache or badge to shout about; instead the nose has a blank, futuristic expression that brings to mind high-end consumer electronics.

Inside, things are equally minimalistic. There’s very little to interrupt the slab of touchscreen in the middle of the dash. It looks smart and contemporary and controls pretty much everything in the vehicle, which is far too forward looking to bother with such anachronistic flourishes as physical switches.

My four-hour expedition down the M3 and A303 is comfortable and relaxing, and I feel as charged as my steed’s battery as I pull into Lympstone Manor, which sits on the River Exe between Exeter and Exmouth. This isn’t just a lovely hotel, it’s also the restaurant of chef-patron Michael Caines (not the one who ordered the doors to be blown off, the other one). 

Following an evening of nine courses, including a ballotine of duck liver with Sauternes jelly, and a thumpingly delicious roast pigeon with celeriac and truffle purée (complex aromas indeed), it was back on the road with the thrifty Omoda, which had barely sipped its decanter of Chateau Unleaded. I didn’t dare distract myself with the fragrance bar on the way down, but at standstill I gave the olfactory options a good prod. 

How does the Omoda 7 smell?

First up ‘Charming Air’, with its delicate top notes of orange, citrus and green leaf, middle notes of rose, peony and geranium, and base notes of amber, musk, cedar and cashmere. Not all that different from the Xerjoff x Lamborghini spray, come to think of it. The Omoda 7 only costs 100 times more than a bottle of Lambo’s fragrance and it comes with five seats and a 201bhp hybrid powertrain, which is a bargain, when you put it like that. Zero to 62mph takes it 8.4 seconds; not quite Urus speeds, granted, but at least you can enjoy the smell for those extra few seconds.

My fellow travellers and I swung by the ivy-covered Bath Priory for lunch, before I cued up the next in-car perfume and our convoy headed for the Cotswolds. ‘Forest Bath’ has nothing to do with the Georgian city’s surrounding woodland and everything to do with the Omoda’s scent option of green leaf, eucalyptus and amber. Arriving at the restaurant Thyme, somewhere close to the village of Fyfield, we’re led through a gorgeous, pungent herb garden before taking over the kitchen for a cookery lesson. I knocked up a very serviceable tapenade under the direction of resident teacher and MasterChef champion Marjorie Lang. I do enjoy a road trip where you go home with jars of stuff. 

The final day’s stretch took us back to London, where I sampled the last of the Omoda fragrances. ‘Dark Temptation’ is a pleasing and not at all slutty or psychotic blend of green leaf and coriander, black rose and saffron, musk, ebony and patchouli.

I soaked it in until we arrived at our last    perfumer, one from the newer end of the scene than Floris. Perfumer H is located in Marylebone; a mid-century modern boutique that creates beautiful and unconventional fragrances. They waft them at me and I nod appreciatively, despite the fact my nose has been used so much over the last few days it’s threatening to go on strike. 

As they regale me with anecdotes about fragrances, I mull over my time with the Omoda 7. It’s impressively priced and even cheaper to run. It’ll do around 40 real-world miles-per-gallon, which has never been more important thanks to Donald Trump’s misadventures in the Middle East. If you’re sticking to urban areas you can squeeze 55 silent and emission-free electric miles out of it, but having a plug-in hybrid over a full EV means it’s much more flexible for when you just need to get in and drive. 

On my driveway right now I have the all-electric Lexus ES 350e, which costs double what the Omoda does and, I discovered last weekend, only has a 273 mile range, rather than the 361 miles the manufacturer claims. It just so happened I had to drive it 271 miles to a rural area with no time to dick around with chargers. I’m still having anxiety dreams. The Omoda 7 will do 770 miles on a tank and charge (confirmed, not make-believe), and it only takes five minutes to get back on the road when you’re running low on juice. 

It’s also lighter than its EV competition, so it handles seamlessly for a car of this class apart from a slight numbness of the steering, which is typical in this day and age. The build quality, materials and equipment compare well to its Japanese, Korean and German rivals, and knocks the Stellantis brands into a cocked hat. 

I returned from my road trip smelling like a high-class boudoir, and with a shockingly small bill for petrol even with the Hormuz-inflated prices. While some of the scent follows me as I exit the vehicle, there’s nothing overpowering about the Omoda 7. It’s subtle, delicate, something you can imagine becoming a staple – but it will never lose that new car smell.