Owners of Hyundai's hot new Palisade SUV are baffled by a mysterious 'putrid stench' emanating from the interior

• The interior of the 2020 Hyundai Palisade purchased by Cars.com puts out a strange, "occasional wretched smell," according to the outlet.
• It has been unable to determine the location or the cause of the mysterious stench.
• Other owners on the Palisade online forum have detailed similar experiences.

Those pine tree-shaped air fresheners you can hang on your rearview mirror typically smell pretty bad themselves, but they might be a welcome respite if you're experiencing the same mysterious smell coming from the inside of your 2020 Hyundai Palisade, as Cars.com currently is.

On August 21, the outlet published a "Car Smell Investigation" of the 2020 Hyundai Palisade Limited that it purchased in December 2019. Cars.com's editorial team, Joe Bruzek reported, all noticed an "occasional wretched smell" emanating from the interior of the car.

The smell was described as, "a sharp chemical odor with a dash of something organic like garlic or rotten produce," which began "at the arrival of 90-degree days in the Chicago area, where Cars.com is headquartered."

Owners in a thread titled "Unpleasant Interior Odor" on the Hyundai Palisade forum shared similar experiences.

The smelly issue comes at a time when strong sales of the Palisade are boosting Hyundai's US business as a whole. The hot new SUV was a major factor in SUVs reaching a 67% share of all Hyundais sold in the US in July, the South Korean automaker's US CEO Jose Munoz told Bloomberg told Bloomberg.

When the Cars.com staff took their car to a dealership, it reported the service director there decided to deep-clean the head restraint; however, because of a backorder, Cars.com hasn't been able to get a new head restraint for almost two months.

Bruzek, author of the Cars.com story, and another staffer "isolated the head restraints overnight" but didn't find any smell from them the morning after. Rather, the "putrid stench was seemingly being emitted from inside the seat cavities once I stuck my nostrils over the front seat's exposed head restraint mounting holes," he wrote.

In an attempt to combat this, the Hyundai dealership sprayed some deodorizer inside both the head restraint mounting holes and the head restraint slots in the third row. Bruzek reported that the deodorizer seemed to work for a couple of days, but then the smell came back to its "peak pungency."

Leather, vinyl, and upholstery cleaner and baking soda had no effect, either.

It's not clear where the smell is coming from on certain Palisade models, why it's happening, or what's causing it.

In an emailed statement, a Hyundai spokesperson told Business Insider, "Hyundai Motor America is aware of the concern and is currently investigating the situation."

Read Cars.com's whole investigation into its smelly car here.