For a long time the car industry maintained a rare and almost touching agreement that words should mean roughly what they appeared to mean.
If a brochure said “boot: 600 litres”, you opened the boot of an ordinary car, with ordinary people sitting ordinarily in the back, and found about 600 litres of space. Fold the seats and there was a second number — perhaps 1,800.
The first described how much luggage a family could take. The second described how much luggage could travel after the family had been forgotten at home.
Then the marketers discovered the sliding rear bench.
It did for boot statistics what offshore accounting did for company profits.
Nothing illegal happened.The familiar meaning of the number simply ceased to be respected.Space was not created. It was reassigned.
The new Škoda Kodiaq is advertised with a boot of up to 910 litres. Volkswagen gives the Tayron up to 885. On paper, two family SUVs around 4.8 metres long have swallowed the luggage capacity of a serious estate car, added a pair of inflatable mattresses and retained the second row.
There is no folding of spacetime beneath the MQB Evo platform. The rear bench moves forwards, its backrests can be made more upright, and space previously occupied by legs changes department. It is now employed by the luggage compartment.
The seats remain upright. The belts remain present. Five places remain in the registration document. The car is therefore still a five-seater in much the same way that an apartment with its kitchen in the corridor remains a two-bedroom.
Manufacturer vs independent measurement
Both figures can be true.
That is the problem.
manufacturer
655LADAC
+39%manufacturer
635LADAC
+39%The percentage is the manufacturer figure compared with ADAC’s result: 910 is 38.9% greater than 655; 885 is 39.4% greater than 635. Expressed the other way round, ADAC’s figures are about 28% lower.
Method / why numbers diverge
This is not one trick. It is several measuring tapes.
ADAC fills the usable space with standardised foam blocks, broadly following ISO 3832, up to the lower edge of the luggage cover or rear windows. It excludes awkward cavities and double floors, sets the front seats for a 1.85-metre occupant and puts adjustable parts such as sliding benches into a standardised position.
Manufacturers are not necessarily lying. They may count spaces ADAC excludes, use smaller measuring blocks, choose another load boundary and report the bench position that produces the largest permitted figure. The result can comply with a method and still fail the question a buyer thought was being answered.
That distinction matters. The honest criticism is not that Škoda secretly removed 255 litres from a physical boot. It is that “910 litres” and “655 litres” are answers to different questions, printed as if they were interchangeable.
“Up to” is doing almost all the work
Volkswagen’s own material calls the Tayron an 885-litre car “with five passengers on board”. Formally, that can be correct. Human beings remain countable long after they stop being comfortable.
The phrase up to transforms a capacity into a record attempt. It describes the most luggage-friendly legal configuration, not necessarily the position in which a family would drive for five hours.
Buyer’s rule
Ask for the seating position, not just the litres.
A sliding bench is an excellent feature. Publishing the maximum boot capacity at the least passenger-friendly setting as the main number is like quoting a car’s maximum speed while it is falling from a cliff. The measurement is real. The operating condition is unusually specific.
The useful comparison is a standardised independent measurement, followed by the maximum as a description of flexibility. One tells you what the car carries normally. The other tells you what can be negotiated when the suitcase count gets out of hand.
The most honest car may now be the one whose rear bench cannot move at all. Ideally, it should be nailed down.
Not for safety. It is simply the only known way to stop a marketer taking space from beneath your children and selling it to you a second time.
Sources and methodology
Editorial note
Manufacturer and ADAC volumes are not directly interchangeable because the measurement methods differ. The article uses the discrepancy to argue for standardised, clearly labelled figures — not to claim that either physical measurement is fabricated.
Hero artwork: From Europe With Drive. Vehicle photographs: Alexander Migl, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.