Car Air Fresheners, Perfumes & Scents

It depends on the format more than the brand.

Hanging drops and cards last around 30 to 60 days. They release scent constantly whether you're in the car or not, so a car parked in the sun burns through one far faster than a garaged car does.

Perfume sprays last as long as you make them. A bottle like Aroma AQUA Natural Drop or the Gold Drop spray goes months, because you control the dose. A couple of sprays into the carpet or the headlining rather than a constant release.

Vent clips and diffusers sit in between, roughly three months from something like CARPRO SkysBlu, fading off gradually rather than stopping suddenly.

Heat is what shortens all of them. An Australian summer will halve the life of a hanging drop, so if you park outside rather than in a garage, a spray is the more economical way to go.

Sort of, and it's worth knowing what that smell actually is.

New car smell is mostly the off-gassing of fresh adhesives, vinyl, leather and foam, which fades over the first year or two and doesn't come back. What a new car smell spray recreates is the impression of it, a clean leather and vinyl note over a cabin that doesn't smell of anything else.

That last part is the bit people miss. A spray over a car that smells of old food, damp carpet or smoke just gives you both smells at once. Clean the interior properly first with an interior cleaner, deal with any odour at the source with something like Koch Fresh Up, then add the scent.

Once the cabin is neutral, a leather or vanilla toned fragrance gets you closest. Shine Supply Vanilla Bean and the Aroma AQUA Premium Gold range are the ones people come back for.

Find the source first. Spraying over a smell without dealing with what's causing it just buys you a few days.

Most cabin smells come from one of four places. Carpet underneath the mats, where spills soak in and stay damp. The seat base, particularly cloth seats. The boot, especially if something has leaked in there. And the air conditioning system, where mould grows on the evaporator and the cabin filter, which is the one that no amount of spray will fix because the smell is being blown at you.

Once you've found it, clean it. An interior cleaner for hard surfaces, a carpet and upholstery cleaner for fabric, and an extractor or steamer if the carpet is genuinely soaked.

Then treat what's left. Shine Supply Cool Breeze and Koch Chemie Fresh Up use enzymes that break apart the particles causing the smell rather than covering them, and CARPRO So2Pure coats the surface so odours have less to cling to. On a bad one, expect to do it more than once.

Car air fresheners are typically attached to vents or hung from the rear view mirror in order to best release the scent throughout the vehicle whereas diffusers use scented oils and a porous material like bamboo to emit the fragrance.

Car deodorisers on the other hand contain strong enzymes that breakdown smelly odours and help remove the bad smell altogether!