New car smell is one of the most talked about, least understood smells in the automotive world. It is not one specific ingredient. It is a mix of off gassing plastics, adhesives, and fabric treatments, which is a less romantic description than the moment usually gets, but it explains something important: that smell is temporary by design, and once it is gone, it is gone for good.
Most new car smell fades meaningfully within the first month or two, faster in hot climates or with more driving. What replaces it, left alone, is not much of anything, or eventually, the smell of whatever gets tracked in, spilled, or left in the car over time. There is no version where the new car smell just naturally continues.
This is the exact window most new owners miss. Right when the factory smell starts fading is the moment to decide what the car smells like next, instead of letting that decision get made by accident over the following year.
The instinct a lot of people have is to just grab whatever is at the gas station checkout: a plastic tree, a clip-on vent freshener, something cheap and immediate. That solves the problem for about three days while smelling synthetic and stale itself, which somehow feels worse than no smell at all.
A better approach is treating this the way you would treat picking a new cologne. Try a few options. Notice which one you actually want to keep smelling every day. A sample kit with all four Drive scents, ONE, FOUR, SIX, and NINE, makes that decision easy without committing to a single scent before you know what you like in a car specifically, which is not always the same as what you like in a bottle.