COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Wake up and smell the Bentley

Does yours smell? Mine doesn’t. But Gus Doppes’ does. Really bad. His car, that is.

Newport Beach resident Gus Doppes isn’t just anyone when it comes to how things smell, and his car isn’t just any car. Doppes is, or was, the proud owner of a new Bentley Arnage, which puts out about 400 horsepower and put Gus out about $215,000, both of which are a lot. Two hundred fifteen thousand dollars is twice as much as my car costs. OK, it’s twice as much as twice as much as my car costs.

I would think that when you spend two hundred grand and change for a car, you expect certain things. You expect it to run; you expect the radio to work; you expect the doors to close. On the other hand, in the things-you-don’t-expect column, is having your new $215,000 set of wheels smell like what Doppes describes as “a strong, chemical smell, like burning oil.”

Not good.

The aroma of burled walnut or rich Corinthian leather or even your basic new-car smell — any of those will do, although the last one is a little disappointing at that price. But a strong, chemical smell like burning oil is no bueno in an AMC Pacer, let alone a Bentley.

And yet, one fine day in April of 2002, as he drove his beautiful new Bentley home from Newport Auto Center on East Coast Highway, that was exactly where Gus Doppes found himself — in a really, really expensive car, that smelled really, really bad. Little did he know that the short drive home would be just the start of a very long, very costly, quite maddening, and at times surreal odyssey into a parallel automotive universe — where up is down, black is white and whatever you think you saw, or smelled, you didn’t.

Doppes reached a major milestone in his four-year quest for fresh air about 10 days ago, when an Orange County Superior Court jury awarded him $214,300 for the smelly Bentley plus $100,000 for damages. Who gets to pay whose legal fees, which are robust, and whether the verdict will be appealed remains to be seen.

Does smell really matter? It does to Gus Doppes. A lot.

You see, it just happens to be how he makes his living. Doppes owns California Scents, a successful Irvine company that makes — ready? — air fresheners for cars. No, Virginia, you cannot make this stuff up.

I spoke to Gus Doppes telephonically on Friday afternoon, and the story is even curiouser than I first thought.

Doppes, who seems to be calm, reasonable and intelligent, says he tried to conduct himself as such throughout his olfactory ordeal. In the first 18 months he had the car, it was in the shop for some 3 months, sometimes for the minor mechanical tinkering that every new car requires, but mostly for its eau de crude oil cachet. Over the course of many visits to the service aisle at Newport Auto, the responses to Gus’ problem went through the usual cycle we’ve all experienced with that noise or vibration that just won’t go away. Stage One: Denial — “What smell?” Stage Two: Acceptance — “Oh, that smell.” Stage Three: Feigned Surprise — “Really? It’s still there?”

As days begat weeks which begat months, a filter would be changed here, some fluids replaced there, but the car still reeked.

Gus tried to be reasonable, or as reasonable as one can be when one owns a $200,000 car that one can barely stand to be in, but he remembers the exact moment when his patience scurried out the service drive and down East Coast Highway, screaming and waving its little arms.

After months of being told that they just couldn’t fathom what the problem was and that they had never heard of such a thing, Newport Auto told Doppes that there was, come to think of it, an “odor reduction kit” from Bentley for just this problem. It didn’t take a spontaneous-combustion scientist to know that Newport Auto obviously knew exactly what Doppes was talking about, and smelling, all along, and that other Bentley owners had smelled something rotten. “The whole thing just blew me away,” Doppes said.

But now Doppes found himself wrestling with not just Newport Auto, but Bentley Motors as well. A representative of Bentley Motors would have to make a thorough nasal inspection of Doppes’ car before they would authorize the “odor reduction” procedure, which was complicated and pricey. Some time later, the Bentley representative inspected the car, and it did indeed pass the smell test, or not pass, depending on your point of view.

Gus’ still shiny and hardly used Arnage checked into Newport Auto for a lengthy stay for the odorectomy, which requires much of the interior of the car to be disassembled so that a special foam can be pumped into the door panels and other nooks and crannies. When Doppes picked up the car, the smell was a little better, but the next morning, there were little puddles of plastic goop forming beneath the car.

The verdict? The foam hadn’t set properly and the entire process would have to be repeated, at which point Doppes asked to just swap his car straight across for another one to which the answer was, in a word, “No.”

Back to square one, take the interior apart, squirt, reassemble, done. Except it wasn’t.

More dripping, more wrestling, bring it in, off with the door panels, in with the foam, on with the door panels, done. Except it wasn’t.

Again, it was, “Could I just have another car?” And again, it was, “Wait let me think — no.”

Now things moved past unpleasant to downright mean.

“They said I had an ultra-sensitive sense of smell and the odor was not that bad,” Doppes said. At that point, Doppes knew it was time to see a solicitor, which he did, and that started years of mediators and courts and a mountain of legal documents so high that you could buy a Bentley with what they cost.

Speaking of Bentley, they did a pretty good job of making themselves look bad through all this, but they outdid themselves when they got to court. When they finally responded to repeated requests from Doppes’ attorneys for any and all e-mails between Newport Auto, the regional representative and Bentley Motors about all this, they announced that all those e-mails had been, for reasons unexplained and inexplicable, deleted — poof, gone, no idea how that happened, our bad. Getting anything out of Bentley was so tough that the discovery process was turned over to a separate judge called a discovery referee (great title, no?).

The discovery referee, a retired judge named John Zebrowski, was not amused, and his jury instructions regarding the vanished e-mails showed it: “These email records were destroyed, according to Bentley, even though this case (which you are now trying) was pending at the time the email records were destroyed. It is up to you, the jury, to determine what inference, if any, to draw from Bentley’s destruction of email records.”

Got it, judge, and given last week’s verdict, so did the jury.

So that’s it then. The story of Gus Doppes and his Bentley is a lesson for us all: Just because something costs a bundle doesn’t mean it smells good. I asked Gus if he would ever buy another Bentley. He said apart from the smell, he still loves the car.

“I might buy another Bentley,” Doppes said, “but the jury is still out.”

See? Even if your Bentley smells bad, a sense of humor never hurts.

I gotta go.