Automotive exhaust doesn't typically have a pleasant odor, although you usually shouldn't be able to smell your car's exhaust fumes. However, there are some situations where your exhaust may produce a more noticeable odor. These smells can range from rotten eggs to gasoline to acrid burning odors. Unfortunately, a detectable odor from your exhaust usually indicates an underlying problem.

Note that some odor may be normal when your car first starts. Vehicles typically run a richer mixture while cold, which means a gasoline smell can be normal when starting your car (especially on cold days). However, a pungent gas odor from your exhaust after your car warms up can indicate one of these three issues.

1. You've Got a Bad Sensor

Sensors are often the underlying cause of many modern automotive issues. Your car's sensors provide its computer with the critical information necessary to adjust the fuel-to-air ratio. Too much fuel or oxygen can affect how your car runs, reducing fuel economy, starving performance, and even leading to severe damage.

If one of these sensors fails, your car may make fuel mixture choices or revert to a failsafe fuel trim. As a result, your car can run rich, meaning you have too much fuel in your combustion mixture. This unburnt fuel can enter your exhaust, producing a noticeable gasoline odor. Common components that can cause this problem include oxygen, mass airflow, and high-pressure fuel sensors.

2. You've Got a Leaky Injector

Sometimes your car will run rich because the computer erroneously adds too much fuel to the mixture. On the other hand, you may also have a rich condition because undetected fuel enters your combustion chamber. The fuel rail (or high-pressure) fuel sensor is typically the last place your computer can detect fuel pressure, so any extra gas beyond this point will only be detectable in your exhaust stream.

Modern, direct injection cars use fuel injectors to spray precise amounts of vaporized gas into each cylinder. These injectors can fail in various ways, including leaks from the injector nozzle or leaks due to faulty sealing o-rings. Whatever the case, this extra fuel will create an imbalance in your combustion mixture, allowing excess gasoline to enter your exhaust system.

3. You've Got a Misfire

Misfire is a general term that refers to failed combustion in one or more engine cylinders. Misfires occur because your engine can't complete the normal combustion process, typically due to problems such as an insufficient spark, poor compression, or a lack of oxygen. Misfires typically cause your car to run poorly, although minor or infrequent misfires may be harder to notice.

A misfire can have numerous severe impacts on your car, and misfires won't always cause your exhaust to smell like gasoline. However, incomplete combustion is a common reason gasoline enters the exhaust stream, so misfires are one potential culprit for a noticeable exhaust smell. If you can smell gas from your exhaust and your car runs noticeably poorly, you probably have one or more misfiring cylinders.

For more information, contact a company such as Xtreme Machines.