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Smell of melting plastic

2473 Views 9 Replies 7 Participants Last post by  Rockster
Just have 1/2 hour in on my new Hellcat Charger Redeye. Picked it up 2 days ago. I smell melting plastic under the hood but see nothing. Any suggestions?
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Just have 1/2 hour in on my new Hellcat Charger Redeye. Picked it up 2 days ago. I smell melting plastic under the hood but see nothing. Any suggestions?
As the various soft components: wiring insulation, hoses, plastic panels, etc., heat up they out gas and this can produce an odor. This also happens to things in the cabin like the dash, seats, carpets, and one sign of this is the hard to remove film that forms on the inside of the windshield and to a lesser extent the side and rear glass.

Not sure if there are any labels or anything on the exhaust system hardware or on any hardware that gets hot that could possible melt. This would be a fire risk and I can't see a factory building cars that have such an easily dealt with risk.

I have over time with several of my cars detected an odor of hot oil or even "burning" plastic. In one case it was a hot engine oil leak that only dripped oil on the exhaust manifold. The small amount of oil was vaporized and the fumes pulled into through the cabin air intake.

With a couple of new cars -- Porsche cars -- it was the factory applied cosmoline that had been sprayed on the running gear/suspension hardware, engine and even onto the exhaust. This to protect these surfaces from the exposure to salt air as the vehicles are shipped from Germany to the US via an auto transport ship.

In other cases the odor came from some trash that blew up and touched/stuck to a hot exhaust manifold. For another reason I had exposed the engine -- removed the engine cover -- to look at the engine and happened to spot a piece of charred plastic on top of the engine block between the intake runners.

If the odor persists or the car starts to manifest issues/electrical gremlins you probably want to have the car in and checked out. If you want you can even have it checked out now. It is a new car. While new car problems are rather rare they are not unknown and while I don't think this is the case there could be a problem.
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Yep I had plastic bag stick to a pipe on a Camaro one time didn't know what it was cause when you would get in to drive it would take some time to start melting , found it when it was up on a rack and it took a lot of work to get it off. To this day it's a habit when I see a plastic bag blowing around and have to drive over it I'm looking in the rear view to make sure I can see it hasn't stuck under the vehicle
I do the same. I am concerned about the bag sticking to a hot exhaust pipe but also getting caught by the front of the car and possibly blocking air flow through at least part of the radiator.
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