driving home today i all of a sudden am innondated with the worst smell i've EVER smelled. i literally nearly puked. i thought it was the dump truck in front of me so i rolled up the windows and turned on the ac, but when i got home and got out there was the smell again...
i checked under the hood, where it seemed to be coming from but i didn't see anything... best thing i can describe it as is burning / rotting corpse... i figured i'd find a mouse or something bigger in there. i'm hoping it was a small animal that has since fallen out... blech, i don't know what to think...
has anyone had a similar experience? i seriously hope it goes away when i go out later.
YUCK.

christina.

 

Ever smelled a burning clutch or brakes?
(The smell is the same)

Did it smell like that?

 

I had a similar experience...when I was 16 at my parents house. This awful smell started getting worse and worse in my bedroom, but I coulnt find its source. Finally I went to get something out of my bottom drawer and found that a rat had gotten its tail stuck and was hanging from it upside down and all of its inerds had leaked out of its mouth and eye sockets and turned to a rotten mess underneath the hollow hanging corpse. OK, so it has nothing to do with the MINI, but I thought that I would share anyhow because it was disgusting.

 

I recently delt with a dead possum....

Christina, report back when you locate the source... maybe a dead animal in the engine compartment....

Good Luck :smile:

 

Maybe we need to have a "What's grosser than gross?" thread in OT.

 

I keep reading these posts while I'm eating lunch, I know what the terrible smells is gonna be in my office! Ugh. . .Seriously, though, if you think you've gotten a dead animal in there somewhere, the only thing you can do is crawl around looking for it. For your sake, though, I hope you can tell the differenct between dead animals and burning clutches/brakes. . .might need to get it checked out if you can't find the source.

 

Yes it was ....good wordsmithing though!!

 

A bad battery or catalic converter will smell like that. I had the battery go bad in a delivery van I used to own. I opened the hood and the battery was swollen up like a balloon – scared the ***** out of me!

 

how do you handle a bloated battery?



I think an animal probably died under your bonnet...

 

I didn't - Tripple-A did!

 

We had birds make a nest in the engine compartment of a Unimog. It was rather nasty when we started the bad boy up and got it up to temperature. Burning feathers (the just born chicks), burning hair and straw... It was mighty nasty. Glad I didnt have to clean it up.

 

My dad started the engine in a mini-van one morning. The poor cat who was napping on the warm engine didn't make it out... Unless you count the 5 hours of labor from the mechanic removing it.

 

no no, it's not clutch. it doesn't smell like anything mechanical, which is why i'm worried about dead animal. it smells like REALLY rotten garbage. i went back outside and rooted around under the hood a bit but didn't find anything. the smell's mostly gone, too, except a faint whiff now and then. i guess we'll see when i have to go out a bit later.

 

Good luck with that - nothing worse than a stinky MINI. . .

 

this thread is just disgusting..
I better set up a fence around my mini so nothing can crawl into it overnight.

 

You might have just driven over something rotton and got some of the residual smell stuck to your MINI. A couple years ago, I drove through some water on the road that I believe was from a blown sewage line. It absolutely stunk the rest of the trip. When I stopped, I turned the air on full blast for a minute or so trying to get as much of it out of the ducts as possible. When I got to the car that afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised that it was gone.

 

When I was a teenager, a family of mice built their home in the filter box of our toyota corolla wagon. They dragged in leaves, pillow fluff, scraps of cloth, etc and built a cozy little den. I don't think they were killed or anything, at the worst they got a very noisy trip to somewhere else. But on a long shot it might be worth opening up the intake filter box and checking to see if there is anything in there that shouldn't be.

 

Dude that is nasty. You win the disgusting story contest, hands down!

 

hahaha, that happend to me too. i was driving home from a groccery store when all of a sudden i lost power-steering in my old dodge intrepid.. fortunatley i was able to make back home. when i partked the car, i opened the hood and found a kitten paw on top of the intake manifold... the poor kitten was sliced and diced in the serpentine belt..:impatient

 

OK now stop it, stop it now!:impatient Dead kittens, rats & birdies, oh my!

Let's concentrate on, "Have you or a passenger unwittingly spilled anything perishable that may be rotting between the seats or under the floor matts?

Now, doesn't that sound much nicer?

 

It usually happens to me after a big meal in a restaurant, on the drive home, I used to ask my wife to pull my finger but now she refuses, so I do it myself and everytime it seems like the smell just keeps getting worst, at least that's what she says.

Everytime, she says this is the worst smell, just like you said.

 

Dear jeffroestobar,


Thank you for your most enlightening story.

Sincerely,

Russell

 

was drivimg my renault with the sun roof open and started feeling a bit of rain, not enough to close the roof. But is seemed like clear skies. Them I passed an RV and noticed his waste dump hose was hanging out and spraying in the breeze. Nasty.

 

Eau du skunk?

 

a guy lost his power steering while going through a car wash.... he looked under the hood and look what he found! this is a G35C.

look carefully between the engine cover and radiator fan.