New car smell" is a pleasant scent to many, although it's not something that manufacturers necessarily apply at the factory. The various odors a car emits when you buy it are due to synthetic materials in the car off-gassing volatile organic compounds or VOCs. VOCs, as Autocar reports, are things like acetaldehyde, acrolein, benzene, formaldehyde, styrene, toluene, and xylene. Basically, nasty synthetic gasses that evaporate off plastic surfaces during the hot day and then condense back into the car's plastic surfaces at night. In high enough concentrations, these VOCs can cause symptoms in humans like nausea, headaches, itchy eyes—basically, an allergic reaction.
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