Bounce and bouquet

Will lavender-scented burnouts get women to buy tyres? Kumho seems to think so.

What next? Scented tyres, apparently.

THE entire western world seems to be steadily becoming one vast bowl of potpourri.

Everywhere you look, there’s something scenting the surroundings.

We splash on perfume, eau de the toilets, powder the carpets, spray the air, hang little cardboard cut outs of trees in our cars, and strategically place bottles with a forest of reeds sucking up fragrant liquids.

You can buy scented shoes, scratch and sniff toys, deodorised clothing and stay fresh furniture. You can even get a USB oil burner that plugs into your computer port.

And now you can take it another ridiculous step further with perfumed tyres.

Major manufacturer Kumho has introduced car tyres scented with lavender. No, we’re serious.

The range of ultra high performance Ecsta rubber went on the market last year in the Unites States where else priced from around $600 a set.

Kumho says the range ‘disperses its fragrance at warm atmosphere conditions to a radius of around 10 metres’.

`The secret of the fragrant tyres is heat resistant oils, which give off a pleasant aroma’, the manufacturer says.

Okay, so now we know the secret. But we still don’t get the point.

No doubt it’s a bit more pleasant for the bystanders than the reek of burning rubber when you’re smoking them up to show off on The Strand. But the gentle waft of lavender is unlikely to enhance whatever malformed idea of machismo you think you’re projecting.

And why has Kumho chosen lavender _ traditionally the preferred scent of genteel old ladies. Why not Chanel No 5? Or some celebrity perfume. J Lo, Britney and the Beckhams have put their names on variously labelled gallons of the stuff already although Posh and Beck’s latest effort is said to smell worse than a tyre fitter’s armpit, let alone the tyres he’s fitting .

On the other hand, maybe one of the first punishments under the hoon laws could be the mandatory fitting of lavender tyres. As a vehicular version of the electronic ankle cuff, it might serve to curb their enthusiasm if every time they screeched their tyres it sparked calls of `go, granny, go’ from the audience.

This will be helped by broadcasting that Kumho says the lavender tyres are aimed at `female customers who drive such cars as the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Subaru Outback and Chrysler Sebring’.

And if you’re male and drive one of those, bad luck. With that bit of gender stereotyping PR puffery, Kumho has just branded you a big sissy girl’s blouse.

We couldn’t get figures on how successful the product has been for the manufacturer, but reports suggest that if the lavender range is a strong seller it will be followed by orange and jasmine rolling down the line.

Which means strips like The Strand will start to smell as delightful as one of those cheap toilet fresheners on Saturday nights.

But for those who are more into the visual than the olfactory, Kumho also offers a range of coloured smoke tyres. Apparently just the thing for doing an attention getting burnout as you drag race your mates past the police station.