2016 rear mesh cargo cover permanent removal - impossible?

someone tell me I'm stupid, but I'm trying to remove the rear cargo mesh cover permanently so i can stow large cargo items. the cover is a lightweight mesh with bendy wire frame. there are three attachment points: 2 on the trunk body and 1 on the liftback door. I cannot seem to remove the loop of string on the liftback, as its too tight and wrapped on this mushroom peg, which doesn't come off. what the heck? if its really impossible, this is a dumb design. what am i missing?

 

OMG-that plier trick worked! many thx bisco! the loops were actually stitched shut and then sealed with these little plastic clasps, which im sure would never work again if i tried to break them open. Anyway, i think i stretched the string almost to breaking, but with the pliers, i was able to get these dam things off. now i can just make a cow hitch knot out of the crazy difficult piece and just refasten it when i need to. But ill probably keep it off most of the time.

the toyota person who designed this brain-dead loop system needs to fired. the worst part is they had the foresight to keep 2 of the 3 loops as easily detachable, so there is no excuse to say they didnt know what was going on.

 

thx biomed, i was able to barely get it off using the plier trick from bisco. i didn't even know about the retrofit retractable cover. i may look into that option too. the mesh cover is kind of nice since it so light and somewhat flexible. ill probably go with keeping the mesh cover now, using the cow hitch knot on the nasty of the three mount points.

 

after working through this minor issue, i have to come to realize this is a first year gen4 bug. here's the details and a probable fix. the mesh cover has "ribbon loops" (as opposed to the the string loops) which attach to the t-mushrooms in the picture. those face the front of the car and the t-shrooms are in the front of the trunk body. those are fine. the other 2 shrooms are string-based and are a big one (on the liftback), and a small one (on the rear trunk body). the sewn-loop double-ended fastener is a cord which is threaded through another small loop sewn into the edge of the mesh cover. essentially the double-loop cord has two sizes of loops: a big end and a small end. the big loop is meant to attach to the big shroom and the small loop to the small shroom. in this configuration, everything works fine and you can remove the cover completely. the problem is Toyota took the liberty to stitch the loop string at a certain distance onto the edge of the cover. so if you reverse the string, everything fits on the shrooms, but when the lift-back goes down, the cover sags rear end down, because the double loop string is fixed via a stitch to the edge of the cover.

FIX: very carefully cut the stitching holding the looped strings (second picture), adjust the length correctly and then re-stitch them. this is clearly an engineering bug where the factory didn't know which end to sew in the up-position and reversed them. The cow-hitch may work too, but i haven't tried it yet.

Many thx to those that chimed in. i may do a write-up document on this problem. but hopefully the thread and fix is digestible.