folding rear seat question

question for the CX-7 owners:

how flat do the rear seats fold? are they actually FLAT (like a subaru forester), or are they ramped up over the seat bottoms (like most cars)? if they ramp up, how severe is the angle (i.e., how much vertical space is lost)?

i'm interested b/c i'd need to load 2-3 large & tall (31") dogs in the back, and a "folding" seatback that only folds halfway is no good...the flatter the better. i'm spoiled by my corolla, which has 33" of space from the flat hatch floor to the headliner.

I get a rough measure of 28" at the hinge of the seat fold (at the rear door post) and 27" at the front. A ramp-up of 1". This is more pronounced on the 60% side, I think because there are seat belt buckles that are underneath.

A CAUTIONARY NOTE

The flat rear is carpet/plastic reversible. But where the seats are folded down, I find carpet type material only. Not sure that's what you want for your dogs.

Additionally, there's this (apparently) fixed window-shade type bar that transverses across where the seat backs of the rear seats would be if they were in the upright position. This provides the privacy shade for cargo behind the rear seats. The bar, however, prevents full utilization of all space when all the seats are flat.

I'm trying to attach pix of what I mean. Hope this helps.

My fault for not looking to see if uploads were successful.

Attachmente were too big - I've resized them and hopefully this will work.

That bar isn't removeable? If not that sucks.

OK - I blew it. The easiest way to hide things from some people is to put it in writing.

The manual says the bar is removable. I haven't tried, though, 'cause it's raining now.

The bar is removable. I posted pics of the bar removed in this thread:

http://www.msprotege.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123635724