I hate to have my first post doubting The Master, but the environmental chemist in “New Car Smells” can’t be Dr. Ozonoff.
- Forgetting to include a link to the column in question makes Uncle Cecil go something something: What exactly causes “new car smell”?
- Ten seconds of searching on Google found the bio page for the good Doctor: David M. Ozonoff, MD, MPH.
But I’m sure whitetho also meant to say, “Welcome to the SDMB!”
KneadToKnow, that’s my job. (ahem) (clears throat)
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Cecil’s column can be found on-line at the link provided by radiohead whitetho.
moderator, «Comments on Cecil’s Columns»
How 'bout that? Dr. Ozonoff is a real person. He got his MD from Cornell and his MPH from Cartalk University.
That’ll teach you to doubt the master.
Just wondering… What about the upholstery and carpeting?
Don’t they also provide at least some of the scent?
After all, there is a big surface area from these items inside a car, and they do have a definitive smell when new, as can be easily checked out at any department store.
(Beware, you may be looked upon with some interest while ckecking, especially carpets) :eek:
Any info about the contribution of said items?
Is the new car smell the same no matter which car it’s in? Because different cars may have different interior materials, outgassing different chemicals. This would cause the smell in a new Volvo to be different from the smell in a new Chevrolet, wouldn’t it?
One thing that you should be wary of…
DiOctylPhthalate is a primary cause of hard disk failure. It corrupts silicon extremely quickly and is very hard to stop with the filters put on the HDDs. So don’t take your laptop to work in your new car…
When I was a wee lass, my aunt’s new Mercury Cougar had a very extreme new car smell. Every time I would ride in it I would get carsick - bad. My parents also had a new car, a Chevrolet Caprice, but the new car smell in that vehicle didn’t bother me that much. One of the big differences in the cars’ interiors was my aunt’s car had those fake leather vinyl seats, and my parent’s car had fabric seats. So I am thinking that the chemical in the vinyl seats was making me sick. Once in awhile I’ll catch a whiff of something that reminds me of that vinyl seat smell and I’ll feel sick again.
Eh, Twitch, have you got a cite for this? 
[quote]
[ul]**
[li]DiOctylPhthalate is a primary cause of hard disk failure.[/li][li]It corrupts silicon extremely quickly.[/li][li]So don’t take your laptop to work in your new car.[/ul][/li][/quote]
**
Or is it just an “everybody knows” kind of thing?
'Cause I ain’t having much success finding anything on Google under “dioctyl phthalate silicon hard drive corrupt laptop new car” and variations thereof.
The hard drive in a laptop is sealed off from the air in a hard plastic case, so as to be dustproof, so I would think it would be well protected from the rather small amount of dioctyl phthalate fumes that would be found in a new car.
Also, I don’t see any body of data out there saying, “All these people had their laptop hard drives destroyed, and the suspected culprit was the fumes from their new cars.”
So? Fight my ignorance, please.
P.S. The Better Half, peeking over my shoulder on his way to work (“The guy said what?”) and looking at your bolded quote above, adds, “Besides, hard drives aren’t made out of silicon chips, they’re made out of glass and aluminum with a magnetic coating.” So, not that I don’t trust him or anything, but I went and looked it up, and he’s right.
So, how would dioctyl phthalate fumes affect a hard drive?
And yes, I know that glass is made of silicon, but that’s not the same thing. A Google search for “dioctyl phthalate silicon” turns up nothing along the lines of, “Never get any dioctyl phthalate near your silicon, because it will destroy it.” So, got a cite?
Apparently dioctyylpthalate (DOP) is a Non-Volatile Residue that can coat the surface of a drive and make it sticky. (Look for NVR in the link)
The article “Designing a Cleaner Hard Drive” gives an overview of the problem without sprcifically mentioning dioctylpthalate.
Okay. Got that. Although…it’s kind of a “qualified” hit:
It’s a website that manufactures “cleanroom” gloves, so as a cynic I kinda wonder why that’s qualified like that. Are they trying to lump a whole lot of sort-of-related chemicals into that “almost all” list, so as to make you think that you, too, might need to buy their gloves to use in your cleanroom assembly plant, if your assembly plant might have “related” chemicals present in the air? There are also several other “qualifiers”:
Anyway, I’m not really quibbling with the fact that DOP is probably bad for the surface of a hard drive, and I do thank you for fetching that link, Squink.
(Hey, that rhymes! 
)
But–it doesn’t say anything about DOP “corrupting” the silicon. It’s just talking about the mechanical action of an unwanted film on the surface.
It also doesn’t say how much of the DOP fumes you’d need to coat the surface of a hard drive and ruin it, how high a concentration of fumes you’d need. I still find it difficult to believe that the small amount of DOP fumes present in a new car could find their way through a sealed hard drive case and ruin the hard drive of a laptop in a new car.
As far as I am aware, there are no air filters on modern hard drives; the whole unit is hermetically sealed. That would mean that any DOP would have to come from plastic inside the drive; so a new car would make no difference. The fumes might affect keyboard contacts and such, but there’s just no exposed silicon in a computer, or a hard drive, for the DOP to eat its theoretical holes in.