A sweet chemical smell inside your Jeep is almost always coolant, either leaking from the heater core into the cabin air or seeping from under the hood and drifting in through the vents. It's not something to ignore, since it usually means coolant is escaping the sealed cooling system somewhere.
Coolant is made with ethylene glycol or propylene glycol, and both have a noticeably sweet, almost syrupy smell that most people describe as similar to maple syrup or butterscotch. Under normal conditions, you'd never smell it at all, since it stays sealed inside hoses, the radiator, and the engine. Once you can smell it inside the cabin, coolant has found a way out of that sealed system, most often through a leaking heater core that lets vapor blow through your vents, or through a leak elsewhere in the engine bay that seeps in through the firewall or air intake.
The strength and timing of the smell can point toward where it's coming from. A smell that appears only when you turn on the heater or defroster and fades when the fan is off points more toward the heater core. A smell that's present all the time, even with the vents closed, suggests coolant is leaking somewhere under the hood and drifting into the cabin through gaps around the firewall rather than through the vent system itself.
Either way, this suggests your Jeep is losing coolant, which matters even if the temperature gauge still reads normal for now. Small, slow leaks can go on for weeks before they add up to a noticeable drop in fluid, and by the time the gauge starts climbing, the leak has often gotten worse. Given how much stop-and-go driving and winter road salt Ann Arbor puts hoses and seals through, catching a sweet smell early is worth acting on.
If you've noticed a sweet smell inside your Jeep, it's worth having the cooling system checked before it causes an overheating problem on the road. Hoover Street Auto Repair in Ann Arbor can pinpoint whether the issue is the heater core or another leak and resolve it properly.