We have a gross mystery! This reminds me of the times I have searched/scoured the kitchen for That Terrible Smell, and it has almost always been (1) the sink disposal or (2) potatoes. Except this time it is happening not in our kitchen, but in our car.
Here are the facts:
• Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth asked me to give her a ride home from school, and I did, and nothing seemed amiss in the car. If it is helpful: the car in question is a Toyota Camry—a 4-door sedan.
• Thursday morning, I got into the car to go to work, and there was A Terrible Smell. The smell category was “spoiled milk”/”liquefied potatoes.”
• Thursday afternoon after work, I looked around a little to see if somehow something from one of my grocery store trips (Monday and Wednesday, or the previous Wednesday) had rolled into a dark corner to commit dark deeds. In the trunk, I saw a little bit of liquid down underneath the floor, in a hard-to-reach area by the spare tire. It smelled accurate. It looked like a couple of teaspoons’ worth at most. My starting theory was that a grocery item (milk carton, half-and-half, yogurt?) had leaked a little bit, and then gone very, very bad.
• Thursday afternoon/evening, I left the trunk of the car open, to air it out / dry it up.
• Friday morning, the smell was CONSIDERABLY MORE INTENSE. I thought, “Okay, it’s only a couple of teaspoons’ worth, but surely if I CLEAN THAT UP the smell will go away more quickly.” I took the carpet layer out of the trunk to get at the spill, only to see that there was A LOT MORE LIQUID THAN PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED. Like, a pint? or more? I am not good at estimating. But it took a roll and a half of store-brand paper towels to soak it all up. Paul had to take the spare tire out so that I could get at all of it.
Did you want a description of the fluid? It was translucent and yellowish/brownish. I guess kind of like pee, except it did not really look like pee, and did not smell at all like pee. It smelled like spoiled milk.
One theory is that a grocery item (gallon of milk, quart of light cream, quart of yogurt, etc.) LEAKED. But…then surely we would have noticed a gallon of milk / quart of light cream / quart of yogurt that was MISSING A PINT OR SO OF MATERIAL.
Another theory is that an entire grocery item (potato, pint of ice cream, individual container of yogurt, etc.) was left behind in the trunk, and went bad. But no such item, or any packaging/residue of such item, was discovered during the excavation and clean-up.
Another theory is that Paul’s coffee-with-cream thermos could have leaked everywhere, without him realizing it. But: (1) this is the car I drive and (2) even if he used my car, as he sometimes does, he would not have put his thermos in the trunk.
Elizabeth wondered if perhaps the trunk lid has a leak, and rainwater got in and then developed a bacteria or something and went very smelly. This is a possibility. But…would water go THAT BAD? And we don’t immediately see anything that looks like a hole in the car trunk.
That is truly a gross mystery. It’s really hard to imagine how that much liquid could have leaked undetected. Maybe if a kid’s reusable water bottle had juice or something non-water that leaked out of the bottle, the bottle was removed, and nobody realized the liquid was left behind?
A few months ago, I was visiting my parents, and I got in their car and announced it smelled like old-ass broccoli. They couldn’t smell it. I went rifling around in the trunk and indeed found old-ass broccoli from the grocery store rolling around. So nasty. And concerning that they couldn’t tell.
My only other thought was that something died and was decomposing into the trunk. Like, from behind a seat? I’m no help at all.
This is my first time commenting after a decade of reading your blog. This happened to me! It was a leak that was allowing water to come up under the front floor mats, that caused some kind of a mold situation. Smelled SO GROSS! My mechanic fixed it and then we had the car detailed and that got rid of the smell. Good luck!
Yes! We had this problem too – small and slow leak that accumulated in the boot where the spare tyre lived. We could work out why the car kept getting mouldy and finally happen to lift up the boot and found a lot of smelly water!
My mystery car smell was once-frozen pork steaks left behind when supermarket shopping was unloaded. Even that odour didn’t approach the awfulness that is a rotten potato, though.
My mystery car smell came from a tiny animal skull a friend had given me that looked 100% dried out and clean (think bleached white bones from a desert). The smell only came when it rained because some water would enter via one of the doors that was damaged and couldn’t close properly, which would create a less than dry atmosphere in the car. The water itself wouldn’t smell, but the skull in the damp-ish car would. Once I removed the skull the smell was gone forever. Kept the skull in my dry house and it never smelled bad again. Just to say: it could be a combination of things in your car that interact with each other…
My grandfather had a rose garden. He spilled liquid fertilizer in the back of his Buick station wagon. Gosh is smelled – think dead fish and manure concentrate. My grandfather was not disturbed by this but it made the whole garage smell.
When grandpa remarried my dad gave the bride a gas mask as a wedding gift.
Oooh this is a mystery! What could it be! I can’t imagine rainwater would get that gross – but maybe it would? I don’t know!
What is it about off potatoes that smells like DEATH? I had a single one go off in my pantry once, with potato juice right on the wood shelf. That was a dark day.
Perhaps a reminder that potatoes are kinda dangerous? I read/saw/absorbed something once that if you get sick from potato salad, it’s not the mayo — that has a lot of acid — it’s likely the potatoes. They do smell AWFUL though.
Yes rainwater will eventually smell that bad!!! We left my sunroof open and thought we dried it all up. Well weeks later we had a terrible smell. In odysseys, the spare tire is in front of the second row seats. All that rainwater had pooled down in the spare tire well and then couldn’t dry up and smelled so bad and looked exactly as you described.
I have no useful advice, but this post did lead me to check my potato box, where, indeed, potatoes were on their way to funkitude. So thank you for that, and good luck ferreting out the car stank.
All the mysteries of this ilk in my life have remained mysteries, so can’t help there. But what IS it about rotten vegetables smelling so much worse than rotten meat? Seems counterintuitive!
I also have a Toyota Camry – though likely older than yours. A day or two after a very bad, very windy blizzard earlier this year I sat down in my driver’s seat only to realize after a minute that my pants were wet. I looked up and realized the water had come from the sunroof, which had a bit of visible wetness around it. I had it resealed but I do not know if it would have leaked had it not been such a…unique storm. All of which is to say seals can be jacked up without it being visible, but it does not explain the extreme smell. How odd! (And gross).
Oooo, a chance to share a gross story! My husband noticed a lot of flies on and around my trunk mid-summer, and it led to the discovery of a package of raw chicken that hadn’t been brought in with the rest of the groceries three days earlier. Hero that he was (and it’s nice to share a story that shows him in a good light for a change since I usually use this a safe space for pointing out his less-admirable actions), he didn’t interrupt my visit with my visiting cousin, and just started to clean it up didn’t even tell me until I asked why he was hosing down trunk items on the back deck.
On damp, warm days I still get a whiff of rotting chicken in my trunk 5 years later.
Why are there SO MANY opportunities for gross smells?
My daughter all-too-frequently leaves a banana in the backseat, and that can go from fine to horrific pretty quickly.
The worst thing that was ever spilled in my car was chicken… juice? Something punctured the corner of a package of raw chicken and the liquid spilled out of it into my trunk. It was extremely unpleasant.
A head of broccoli rolled out, rotted, and liquified. This happened to us in a small 2 room apartment 28 years ago.
I kinda think that a leaky milk carton, if it’s paper, could easily ooze more than a cup into a secret trunk region that allows days of fermentation and no one would be the wiser. My kids, at least, don’t pay much attention to how full a carton is.
My Car Stink candidate is a blueberry muffin under the passenger seat. A delicious blueberry muffin, made by my mom, that I assumed my friend had eaten on our road trip back from visiting, but no. She left it under her seat rather than asking me if I wanted it. So I assumed that there was no food in the car, but even if I’d thought of the neglected muffin, I would never have thought a baked good could smell so bad. SO BAD. That thing was FOUL.
Growing up we had a station wagon that wasn’t road worthy, but my Dad kept it anyways. We drove it up and down the driveway on trash days. It also had a leak. We are not sure if it was trash leaking or the roof leak, but that car smelled of death and awful things. We still fought for the chance to drive it (while unlicensed of course), but it was nasty.
There was also the time that one of my kids left a turkey sandwich in the car just before we went to the airport and left the car in outdoors airport parking, in Phoenix, for 10 days. That was a terrible ride home from an otherwise lovely vacation.