If you’ve ever walked up to your car and felt that the air around it just didn’t smell opulent enough, BMW might have you covered in the future. A recent patent filing uncovered by CarBuzz seems to suggest that BMW is working on a technology to freshen the air surrounding the exterior of a car, so that it smells pretty as you near your car.
According to the patent filing, the front Roundel on the hood will rise up and spritz scented air for the passengers to smell as they enter. What sorts of scents would you like as you enter your car? BMW will likely sell scented cartridges, just as it does for interior fragrances in cars like the 7 Series but it would be interesting if owners could customize their scents (I tip my hat to CarBuzz for beating me to the burnt oil smell joke). What happens when there’s a breeze that takes your scent away, though? And what happens to the BMW iX, will it lose its washer fluid filler to an external air freshener?
Is this something that’s actually all that useful, outside of being something that snobby rich people brag about? Not really but when it comes to the future of EVs, automakers are patenting all sorts of wacky technologies, hoping to differentiate their cars from competitors’. Because EVs feel largely the same, in terms of powertrain and performance, differentiating them in other unique ways is going to be more and more common.
Of course, BMW could focus on creating more engaging designs, instead of perfuming the air surrounding a car, but Tesla has proven that EV customers like shiny, silly toys. Otherwise there wouldn’t be whoopee cushion features inside. So creating perfumed entry air does seem like something EV customers would talk about on forums. There would also naturally be countless posts about how the Roundel became frozen in the up position, constantly spraying sandlewood-scented perfume into the air.
[Source: CarBuzz]
