Donaldson R F Luggage vs Car Boot Calculator
Will your luggage fit in the boot? Enter the boot size and your bags and get an estimate of how much of the space they will use.
Estimate only. Boot shapes vary, and suitcases are rigid boxes with wheels and handles, so they do not pack by volume. Wheel arches, the parcel shelf and the tailgate opening can stop a bag that "should" fit. Try a real bag in the real boot if you can. No car models are stored: you type the sizes.
The boot
Packing efficiency is my assumption, not a measured figure: the share of the boot that rigid, differently shaped bags can realistically fill. Lower it for awkward boots or hard cases.
Your luggage
Example sizes are typical outside measurements including wheels and handles; measure your own bags and do not rely on an airline's cabin rules from here.
How the estimate works
A bag's volume is length × width × height in cm ÷ 1,000 (litres of the outside box), or the litres you enter. The boot is your litres figure, or width × depth × height ÷ 1,000, or the middle of a rough class. The boot's usable space is that number × the packing efficiency. If your luggage volume is within 85% of the usable space it "should fit", up to 100% it is "tight" and above 100% it is "unlikely to fit". These thresholds are my rule of thumb, not a standard. When you give the boot in centimetres and the bags in centimetres, each bag is also checked against the boot's box to see whether it can physically fit in any orientation.
Litres on a brochure. Car makers usually quote boot capacity in litres measured by stacking standard 1-litre blocks (200 × 100 × 50 mm) up to the parcel shelf, a method known as VDA and described in ISO 3832. That figure is a useful comparison but is not the same as the room for real suitcases, which is why the packing efficiency is there. The rough classes are illustrative only: a city car boot is often in the low hundreds of litres and an estate's can be more than double, but every model differs, so use your own handbook figure when you have it. For freight sizes and shipping costs see the Dimensional Weight Calculator; for a trip's packing see the Packing List Generator.
Source / Last verified (26 September 2026): the litre-block method (1 litre = 200 × 100 × 50 mm, ISO 3832 and the VDA method) is described in Metrology News, "Measuring vehicle luggage space", a secondary article; the standard itself (ISO 3832) is paywalled and was not read. The volume formulas are geometry. The size classes (city about 200–300 L, compact 300–400 L, SUV 450–600 L, estate 550–700 L), the example bag sizes, the 75% packing efficiency and the 85% / 100% thresholds are rough assumptions typed by me, not from a standard or a manufacturer; treat them as approximate.