Many people love the smell of gasoline, but carcinogenic benzene flavors those aromatic vapors. What if instead of harmful toxins you could fill up your Ferrari or Lamborghini with a “green” fuel that smelled like a manly cologne? That’s exactly what some Dutch researchers are working on, with an eye toward supplying the luxury car market with exclusive, boutique, environmentally-friendly service station experiences.

“We are making a luxury product out of a commodity like Starbucks did out of coffee,” Dr. Michael Boot, Innovation Manager at the Eindhoven University of Technology’s Department of Mechanical Engineering told a group of journalists during a recent renewable energy media tour around the Netherlands. “Our philosophy is if you want to come with a biofuel on the market, it has to be either very cheap to produce…or it has to be extremely high end, high value,” he explained.

Boot’s research extends into both these categories and the “high-end” product he described actually started as a joke. The researchers looked at gasoline’s shortcomings and designed a product that addressed the fuel’s potential areas of improvement. As previously mentioned, gasoline’s carcinogenic nature is not ideal, the octane could be higher and ideally you would want more energy per unit of volume. “So when you fill up you don’t get 100 joules you get 105 joules or something,” said Boot.

You want 4 things: high octane, high energy per liter (or gallon), a scent that you can play with and non-carcinogenic properties. And when you look to design a fuel that combines all those attributes, by pure coincidence said Boot, you end up with exactly the same molecules that go into diesel and gasoline engines.

“Both engines would most like to drink aromatic oxygenates,” Boot said.

They then cross-referenced perfume ingredients with fuel chemistry and found about 10 compounds used in fragrances that are are also ideal for making gasoline.

“I was fascinated that if you smell rose petals there is just one molecule responsible for the smell essentially and you can draw out this molecule and that’s exactly what we’ve been testing in these engines,” Boot told the group. “We’ve had rose in the engine, jasmine in the engine, all these things.”

And inasmuch as ethanol is mostly alcohol, any perfume you buy in the store is also a fuel. So the idea is to take a duel approach to marketing the product. Once all approvals have been obtained, Boot’s team will sell it as a fuel on the fragrance market. Picture a cologne that comes in a bottle shaped like an oil drum or gasoline pump. This strategy allows the inventors to get fragrance-market prices for the fuel. Imagine getting $1,000 per liter for your gasoline.

The second approach is to build luxury fueling stations in regions with high densities of supercars. “We call them country clubs on the road.” People would pay a membership fee and it would be a hip thing to be a part of, Boot explained. The focus would be on exclusivity, with only one Ferrari allowed per location for example. “Paris Hilton would be explaining why we should accept her as a member in Beverly Hills for her pink Bentley,” he joked.

“If you can do it for coffee why can’t you do it for fuel? You have these cars that in some cases cost in excess of a million dollars and they are putting in the same fuel that you put into a hundred dollar car. Why is there no luxury fuel?”

Well it looks like there soon will be, thanks to the reverse-engineering-fuel innovators at Eindhoven University of Technology. Although all those poor Tesla owners will be left out of this one.

The Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid for Breaking Energy’s travel and accommodations, but had no editorial input in the formulation of this article.