16th Sep 2007, 11:13
I also have that noxious odor coming from the trunk of my 2001 Jetta GLS. I first smelled it this summer after my car was sitting outside all day in a hot parking lot. Usually it is parked in my garage, so it does not have extended exposure to the sun.
The smell was so nauseating that my husband made me leave the car outside so the smell wouldn't permeate into the house. We looked under the rug and around the spare tire thinking that there was a dead animal. Someone even suggested that it was spilled milk that had spoiled.
When I mentioned the odor to my VW dealer, he played very dumb suggesting that I leave the carpet outside to air out. The smell is not as bad as it was, but it still lingers.
5th Feb 2008, 01:58
Haha... I think every Volkswagen dealership has their own answer to the problem of your car smelling like a box of Crayola Crayons... The one I got was "the heated seats sometimes emit that smell because of the leather."...Well it isn't even real leather folks. According to the website it's "leatherette" so god only knows where the material you are sitting on comes from... From what I gather it's some form of sound insulation that they used in 2001... But after driving my car for as long as I have driven it I can tell you the sound insulation sucks so it didn't even work. A better form of sound insulation is blasting the stereo so loud you can't hear the wind going past you anymore... until the stereo speakers blow out that is... which is pretty easy to do apparently... Although I am a teacher so I can kind of pass off the crayon smell in the car as an "occupational hazard" others cannot. It is emberrassing though. I wish that Volkswagen of America would recognize this as a recall along with the high mount brake light switch and the window regulators... God only knows what the stuff we are breathing in now is...
2nd Feb 2006, 18:27
It's "the crayon smell"- a source of amusement any passenger in my car. I have traced it to the headliner, which, coincidentally, is sitting in my living room (after reading your post I decided to give it a whiff- unmistakable).
I can live with it. Taking the headliner out was a pain, and the reason why I had to remove it was due to the amount of rainwater finding its way into the car- two inches during the last heavy rain. The sunroof drain lines clog easily, and in one instance the rubber tube slipped off the barbed end of the drain at one corner of the sunroof tray. Although I managed to reconnect it, tonight, as my car was parked on the right hand side of the street during a heavy rainstorm, water was pouring off of the now exposed sunroof tray onto the seats and floor. There is no explanation, and I now realize that this has been an issue since day 1.