My Truck’s Bigger Than Your Truck! No It’s Not! Yes It Is!

America’s politicians aren’t the only ones having trouble with numbers and rule interpretations these days: Automotive giants Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are battling over measuring standards that determine whose sport-utility vehicle has the most utility.

It might seem minor, but in a segment as crowded as the market for full-size SUVs, every cubic foot of cargo space and each fraction of an inch of ground clearance matters.

Auto makers spend millions each year advertising such stuff.

And in the Ford-Toyota tiff, the argument is over the substantial 17.4 cubic feet of cargo space and 2.4 inches of ground clearance that Toyota claims its new Sequoia SUV has over Ford’s Expedition.

The fight could have a positive outcome--the independent Society of Automobile Engineers that promulgates automotive measuring standards says it will look into fine-tuning the cargo and clearance rules to eliminate further disagreements.

Toyota’s advertising and published specifications for the Sequoia say the maximum cargo capacity is 128.1 cubic feet and minimum ground clearance is 10.6 inches.

That looks pretty good for Toyota when a shopper interested in such things contrasts it with the 110.7 cubic feet of cargo room and 8.2 inches of ground clearance Ford claims for the Expedition.

But as with lawyers arguing over ballots in Florida, it all boils down to how one interprets the rules.

By the letter of the law, Toyota is correct. But Ford insists that its opponent isn’t honoring the spirit of the rules, which were penned to help consumers compare products.

The Sequoia has more cargo space than the Expedition only if its normally fixed second-row seat is unbolted and removed from the vehicle--a process Toyota says is fairly easy and allowed by the SAE measuring standards.

And the Sequoia’s ground clearance is 2.4 inches more than the Expedition’s because the SAE rules permit the measurement to be made in a way no true off-road enthusiast would ever measure it.

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Ford fired the first shot in the war after Glenn Ray, the company’s chief truck division propagandist, read a review that pointed out the Sequoia’s advantages over the Expedition.

Ray saw red, and the world’s second-largest auto company soon cried foul over No. 3 Toyota’s claim to victory in the space race.

After all, Ray said, the two vehicles have almost identical exterior dimensions--the Expedition, in fact, is 0.7 of an inch longer and 0.6 of an inch wider than the Sequoia.

So how could Toyota come up with so much more interior space?

The only way, Ray charged in an e-mail to more than 100 automotive writers last week, was to have used an outmoded measuring standard that let Toyota include as usable space the area occupied by the Sequoia’s second-row seat--a seat that, unlike the Expedition’s, doesn’t fold flat.

Ray also said that measuring the distance between the ground and the lowest protruding point on the undercarriage shows that Sequoia’s minimum ground clearance is only 0.8 of an inch more than the Expedition’s, not 2.4 inches.

Unfortunately for Ray, by the letter of the rules--so to speak--he is wrong.

In his e-mail response to the same auto writers, John Hanson, spokesman for the products division of Torrance-based Toyota Motor Sales of America, said his company is, in fact, using the newest standard.

“It is unfortunate that Ford chose to make such accusations without taking the time to check the facts,” Hanson wrote.

Indeed, SAE’s latest cargo area measurement standard does seem to support Toyota’s methodology, which was to remove the Sequoia’s normally fixed second-row seat by unfastening the eight thick screws that hold it in place.

The process takes about five minutes and can be done by any Sequoia owner who knows how to handle a wrench, Hanson said.

The standard is for measuring “maximum” cargo space, and it is by removing the seat that the Sequoia provides its owners with the maximum possible space, he said.

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As for ground clearance--well, Ford seems to have taken the high road by measuring the Expedition from the actual low point of the undercarriage to the ground.

“I certainly wouldn’t measure ground clearance any other way,” said off-road enthusiast Ken Roman, who sells equipment and builds vehicles at Dependable Off Road in Orange.

But Toyota followed the SAE rules, which permit the measurement to be taken from the low point of the vehicle’s body, rather than its undercarriage, even though that point is quite a bit higher than the point from which Ford does its measuring.

Toyota engineers, Hanson said, believe their measuring point--the skid plate on the transfer case alongside the transmission, in the middle of the vehicle--is the point that most frequently hangs up on off-road obstacles.

He insists that Toyota did everything by the book and will continue doing so, regardless of how Ford or other manufacturers choose to make measurements.

Ray said he won’t respond to Hanson until Ford’s engineers do a thorough reanalysis of the two vehicles.

At SAE headquarters in Pennsylvania, spokesman Dave Schwartz said that the standards Ford and Toyota are fighting over probably need some tweaking.

“Obviously, some things here are not as clearly stated as they could be,” Schwartz said. “And auto makers will look for loopholes, just like politicians.”

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Times staff writer John O’Dell covers the auto industry for Highway 1 and the Business section. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.