Let me describe a vehicle to you. This ride houses a 5.2-liter supercharged V8 pumping out 720 horsepower and 640 pound-feet of torque with a thunderous roar. It can hit 60 mph in as little as 3.6 seconds and can cruise at 100 mph as comfortably as most cars feel at 55 mph. This vehicle has capabilities that no regular car can dream of matching. You’re probably imagining some supercar right now. But I’m not talking about a supercar. This is the Ford F-150 Raptor R. It’s a full-size pickup truck with enough horsepower to frighten a deity, off-road chops like a racing side-by-side, and does everything with so much speed that it’s hard to comprehend how it’s possible. Somehow, you get all of that in a vehicle with a license plate.
I got to experience the 2025 Ford F-150 Raptor R, which is similar to this year’s 2026 model, during the second-ever Ford Raptor Rally. Ford tossed me the keys to the truck, which I did not lose this time, and left me to do whatever I wanted with the truck for a whole October weekend in beautiful Lake Havasu City, Arizona. More than 400 Ford F-150 Raptor, Bronco Raptor, and Ranger Raptor owners turned up to have a giant party.
When I wasn’t spending time chatting with Raptor owners, I went on my own adventures. In doing so, I proceeded to have what was probably the highest-speed and most extreme desert off-roading experience I’ve ever had behind the wheel. I even got the truck up to 100 mph in the sand, and it practically broke my brain with how well it performed.
(Full Disclosure: Ford tossed me the keys to two Ford F-150 Raptor Rs for one weekend in October 2025 to participate in the second-ever Raptor Rally. Ford paid for my travel, my admission, and most of my fuel.)
The Basics
Engine: Supercharged and intercooled dual overhead cam with variable camshaft timing 5.2-liter “Carnivore” V8.
Transmission: Ten-speed 10R80 torque converter automatic.
Drive: Part-time four-wheel drive with low-range and locking rear differential.
Output: 720 horsepower at 6,650 RPM, 640 lb.-ft. of torque at 4,250 RPM.
Required Fuel: 93-octane gasoline.
EPA Fuel Economy: 10 MPG city, 15 MPG highway, 12 MPG combined.
Base Price: $114,420, including $2,795 destination charge and $695 acquisition fee.
Price As-Tested: $116,935 (estimated for 2026).
The Ford F-150 Raptor has been hammering the trails since the 2010 model year. Back then, the F-150 SVT Raptor, as it was called, was the start of a mad trend. This was a road-legal pickup truck that offered just a sniff of trophy truck performance. It also housed some real firepower under the hood with two V8s, the bigger of which was a 6.2-liter mill with 411 eager horses at the ready.
Those early Raptors would also become meme trucks, as some of their drivers treated their Raptors like they were real trophy trucks, jumping them so high that they triggered the airbags and bent their frames upon reentry, transforming their trucks from totally awesome to just plain totalled in the process. No production truck is that tough. The Raptor went on to capture the hearts of many enthusiasts and even made it into racing video games, so that you could take your Raptor shenanigans digital.
The second-generation Raptor (above), which launched in 2017, was a curiosity. Its capability was technically better than the first Raptor, but missing from the menu was any choice of V8 power. Instead, your only offering was the 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 from the Ford GT, but detuned to 450 HP and 510 lb-ft of torque. The new truck was faster and more Raptor than before, but enthusiasts missed the rumble of V8 power.
The third-generation Raptor launched in 2021, and it was bigger and meaner than ever before. You were even able to order it from the factory with 37-inch tires. Just the tires alone were a big deal. As Road & Track reported back then, putting the Raptor on 37-inch stilts made it so tall that its factory had to be reconfigured just to fit it.
Ford also listened to enthusiasts. Sure, you can make a V6 pump out great power, but the V8 was part of the shock and awe of the original Raptor. So, the V8 came back. But Ford didn’t hold back, because what the team dropped under the hood isn’t a Coyote, but perhaps the craziest Ford V8 that could have been chosen for the job.
The Heart Of A Predator
This is actually our second time driving a Raptor R from the current generation of the Ford F-150. David Tracy did one of his characteristic deep dives on the F-150 Raptor R back in 2022. In it, he described how the heart of the Raptor R’s madness is the 5.2-liter supercharged V8 that the Raptor team stole from the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500.
As it sits in the GT500, the engine is called the Predator. Some tweaks were made to make the engine a better fit for the truck, creating the Carnivore V8.
David’s article explains further:
You may be wondering about the truck’s lower horsepower figure when compared to the GT500. This, powertrain engineer Brian Lizotte told journalists, can be attributed to the fact that the Eaton TVS R2650 blower up top features a smaller pulley diameter in order to “fill in…mid-range torque” for the truck application. You can see some of the changes Ford made to the GT500’s Predator engine for the F-150 application in the great video [click here] by Autoblog’s Zac Palmer. Lizotte talks about how, in addition to the supercharger pulley ratio change, there’s a re-tuned crankshaft damper, a new oil cooler, a deeper sump (since there’s more room on the truck than in the GT500 and since the steep grades a truck deals with off-road and while towing could benefit from a deeper sump), plus changes to the intake and exhaust system
I chatted with Lizotte over dinner, and he really did make it seem like dropping this motor into the F-150 Raptor engine was child’s-play. “You’d think that the truck duty cycle would be harder,” he told me, “It’s really not.” He went on to say that temperatures and loads tended to be higher on the track-oriented Mustang.
“The GT500 was more challenging because the on-track performance aspects of that car,” he said. “You’re literally using every bit of that engine on a track,” noting oil management challenges during high lateral (in corners) and longitudinal (during braking) acceleration events that led the team to develop active baffles. On track, he told me, you just see such high vehicle speeds, high loads. As a result of the driving conditions being less severe in many ways, plus the additional packaging space in the truck, putting the Predator into the F-150 Raptor “was a very seamless execution,” Lizotte told me.
The EcoBoost remains in its home in the regular Raptor, and it still makes a very respectable 450 horsepower and 510 lb-ft of torque. The addition of the 270 horsepower brought on by the Carnivore V8 will set you back a whopping $31,925 on top of the base $79,005 price of a regular Raptor. That places the Raptor R into high-end sports car territory.
While I wanted to scoff at that price, I came to an uncomfortable realization that the Raptor R is basically a supercar, just one not meant exclusively for performance on tarmac. Where a McLaren might be designed to conquer a track at triple-digit speeds, the Raptor R is made to beat the desert into submission at the same velocity.
Everything about this truck is designed to make it better off-road at high speeds. The FOX Dual-Live Valve internal bypass shocks, for example, use electronic control to adjust damping 200 times per second with the mission of making the truck as smooth and capable as possible in the rough. with state-of-the-art electronic control technology. Apparently, the base valves of these shocks help them to provide upward of 1,000 pounds of damping per corner at high speeds.
Ford even sacrificed some towing capacity to allow the Raptor R to be an off-roading beast. You might have ridiculous power behind your foot, but the truck is so softly sprung and optimized specifically for high-speed operations that you get only 8,700 pounds to tow with. That’s still a fair amount of weight, but a decent bit less than the 13,500 pounds that a properly-equipped regular F-150 EcoBoost could tow.
The Raptor R towers 13 inches from terra firma thanks to its standard 37-inch BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A K02 all-terrain tires, or 1.1 inches better than a regular Raptor without the 37s. Off-roading angles are also pretty decent with a 33.1-degree approach angle, 24.4-degree breakover angle, and 24.9-degree departure angle.
Alright, so enough about the nerdy stuff. What’s it like to drive?
Mind-Bending Power
Everything about the F-150 Raptor R is an adventure. It starts with a growl that bounces off every concrete wall in a 1,000-foot radius, and that Carnivore sounds like it’s ready to rip off the face of the Hyundai across the parking lot.
Once the engine settles into its idle, it can be quiet. The Raptor R rocks a Normal, Sport, Baja, Slippery, Off-Road, Rock Crawl, and Tow/Haul driving modes. Put it into Normal, and it sounds like a naturally aspirated V8 at idle. Sport gives it a little bit of a rumble, while Baja just opens up the exhaust and makes the truck sound straight-piped. Thankfully, there are sub-modes just for the exhaust: Quiet, Normal, Sport, and Baja. When you set it to quiet, you almost can’t even hear the supercharger, and the truck sounds like normal traffic.
I came for the full Raptor R experience, so I set the truck to Baja mode right out of the gate. My first move was leaving a parking lot at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where I accidentally laid down two black marks with the snarling V8. Throttle tip-in is hilarious in the sportier modes and makes the engine react like it’s raging out after consuming way too many energy drinks. It just wants to rip a fat burnout while screaming loud enough to wake up an entire apartment block.
Once I caught my composure and stopped laughing. I set the truck to a more reasonable Sport mode and then set off. This time, I only made the rear tires chirp.
The silliness of the Raptor R was captivating. This is a truck that only barely fits in a parking space, stands 80.6 inches tall, and spreads out 87 inches wide. It has more in common with the SS United States than it does with something like a Lotus Emira. Yet, its acceleration is more brutal than most sports cars and even supercars that I’ve driven. When I punched the throttle, I simply didn’t expect this hulking 6,090-pound colossus to take off as if I commanded the USS Enterprise to go to warp. But it did, and it was hilarious.
If you have the truck in two-wheel-drive, it’ll hopelessly spin its tires against a traction control system that fights desperately to rein you in. All the while, the speedometer rises so fast it’s skipping several digits to keep up with the rapid acceleration. Eventually, the tires catch, and forward thrust continues at its relentless rate.
Launching in four-wheel drive is probably the closest I’ll get to strapping myself to a Saturn rocket. My head got tossed into the headrest, and my mission was to keep the launch under control as the world blurred around the truck. The speed at which the Raptor R can move can be incomprehensible. It goes in a straight line like a vehicle with half the weight and less than half the size. The acceleration in this truck was perhaps even more satisfying than the Ford F-150 FP700, in part because the Raptor R is so big, so ungainly, and your last thought after looking at a 37-inch off-road tire is “drag race.” I guess 720 horsepower will make darn near anything into a road missile.
The Raptor R can be made surprisingly docile after putting the drive mode into Normal and the exhaust mode into quiet. The truck will become respectable, even. Throttle tip-in becomes relaxed, pedal response lightens, and the truck’s road rage fades away. It drives almost like a normal F-150 in this mode.
My first experience with the Raptor R was on a roughly 3.5-hour, 200-mile road trip from Phoenix to Lake Havasu. Or, at least that’s what I was told. The truck must have warped time and space because I somehow beat Google’s time by 30 minutes, and I wasn’t even trying. During the Raptor Rally, I met the host of a Raptor club, and he joked that, with the power of the Raptor R, it must have taken me only 20 minutes to drive those 200 miles. It sure felt like it; the truck wants to do nothing but speed.
The highway cruise was effortlessly relaxing. The 37s quietly hummed in the background, and despite the Raptor R’s angry maw and insult to aerodynamics, wind noise was kept at a minimum. I found myself sinking into the soft Recaro seats, turning the air-conditioner on high, and getting really comfortable. For a truck that’s as shouty as a shock jock, it has no problem coddling me when I wanted it. These leather and Alcantara-trimmed thrones even had cooling and heating!
The seating position of a Raptor R is pretty fitting, too. The truck’s towering height means that you see over everything, even crossovers. Between the rabid horsepower, the height, and the sheer size of the absolute unit of a truck, I felt like I was a sort of queen. I continue to see why some folks love jacked-up trucks.
That’s all to say that, while the F-150 Raptor R was built to make its enemies tremble in fear in the desert, it’s a shockingly fun truck on the road. Things get even crazier when the pavement runs out.
Desert Express
I spent much of my time at the Raptor Rally doing Ford’s guided tours. These were great and were perfectly designed so that Raptor owners could really test out the capabilities of their trucks and SUVs. I got to participate in a rock crawl, a medium-speed jump, a hillclimb, and a side-tilting turn. None of this really challenged the truck. It handled the 19-degree climb and the 22-degree side tilt like it was cruising through a parking lot. The medium-speed jump was slightly impressive, mostly because the truck landed like some of my best touchdowns in a Cessna. It was pure butter.
The real test is what I did outside of Ford’s tours. I armed myself with a trail map and just buried the throttle. The Raptor R is no regular off-road truck. I’m convinced that our Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet could have handled that rock-crawling course. But few vehicles could tackle a desert at the sheer speed that a Raptor R can.
I found a strip of open desert where there wasn’t anyone else around, no bushes, and no giant rocks. This strip looked suspiciously similar to an airstrip, only in sand and mildly bumpy.
I lined the Raptor R up like a Boeing 747 entering a runway for takeoff. Then, just like I bury the throttle in a Cessna, I gave the Raptor R a size 11 heel. The Raptor R thundered into action like a turbofan spooling up, and the speedometer began ticking faster than the price boards at my local gas station. 10 mph, 20, 30, 40, 50, and all the way to 100 mph came staggeringly quickly, even on sand. I thought I was going to hear someone call out “V1, Rotate,” if I was crazy enough to keep going.
Instead, I brought the Raptor R down to a more reasonable 40 mph, giggled way too much, and spun the truck around for another go in the opposite direction. I had to abandon my desert strip after another run because I was getting rather addicted to my on-demand rocket launch.
Much of what made this possible was the power, yes, but it was also the suspension and the truck’s stability. 100 mph in the sand was a little bumpy, sure, but I felt confident and in control. I felt like I was driving one of those fancy high-end side-by-sides from Polaris or Can-Am, but nope, I was in a big truck with my cooled seats freezing my butt, air-conditioner on blast, and Alli Walker’s I Like Big Trucks playing from the clean and crisp B&O stereo system.
I then spent the rest of my solo time climbing over rocks, hitting a wicked jump at 60 mph, and, weirdly, even finding a random patch of mud in the desert. The truck did it all with ease, and at a speed that was mind-boggling for something that wasn’t a side-by-side or a dirt bike. At times, I couldn’t believe that the feds even allow this thing to have license plates.
The Raptor R can even put enough donuts to make you puke faster than a merry-go-round. Oh, and it doesn’t matter if those donuts are on sand or pavement; the truck doesn’t care.
The truck even has some pretty cool technology that can keep the violence in check. Its perimeter cameras are great for squeezing between two large boulders. It also has an off-road cruise control, one-pedal trail driving, a trail turn assist, and the drive modes. All of these techy settings can make even a novice look like a pro. I used them just to see if they worked as advertised, and they do. Then I immediately went back to doing things old-school with every assist turned off as much as they’d let me.
The one tech part I greatly appreciated was the navigation system’s breadcrumb feature. At one point, I got so carried away that I found myself far from a road and civilization. I was legitimately lost, and worse, my phone had no service. I was about to navigate by the sky, but then I noticed that the navigation system had drawn a line for every trail I had taken. I just followed the breadcrumbs back, and everything was fine.
Full Send-Approved
Perhaps the most impressive part about the Raptor R was that my abuses didn’t break it. It is hard for any vehicle to take repeated battering from several jumps at 60 mph, washboards at 80 mph, and slamming into hidden rocks without something breaking. Indeed, I sent the Raptor R so hard that I jacked up the alignment. The steering wheel was pretty far off when driving in a straight line. Raptor owners told me that you’ll get that when bashing dunes near triple digits, but note how nothing was actually broken. Even Ford’s people told me they could fix that in a jiffy.
If I had any complaint about the Raptor R, it’s that the fuel economy was atrocious. I averaged 11 to 12 mpg when heading back to Phoenix with cruise control on. Only once did I see 14 mpg, and it required treating the gas pedal like it was made out of lava and avoiding headwinds. I never saw above mid-single digits when off-road, even when I wasn’t doing a dozen donuts. I was able to get the 700 HP Ford F-150 FP700 to get 27 mpg. Such fuel economy was simply unavailable to the Raptor R.
I’m also not entirely sure about the use of Alcantara in a street-legal off-road vehicle. I shudder to think of accidentally bringing mud inside the truck and slathering it on the seat.
I concede that fuel economy is only a small nitpick. I cannot imagine someone spending six figures on a jacked-up 720 HP supercharged desert supercar, hoping to get decent gas mileage.
A Supercar Of A Different Kind
By the end of my drive, I was stuck on that “supercar” language. Like a supercar, the F-150 Raptor R is specialized to do one thing really well. But instead of that thing being Nürburgring lap times, it’s making the desert blur around the cab. When I look at the truck and its price as being a luxurious supercar, it makes some sense to me. I’m not going to say it’s a deal, and whether it’s worth it is entirely up to you. But I see why people will spend condo money on a pickup truck.
I also understand that a truck like the Raptor R is going to be somewhat controversial. It’s 720 horsepower at the foot of any American who can pay the price, no special licensing required. It towers so high that small children can disappear in front of the hood. Even the bed height is so high that getting things in there will suck. In a way, this truck is the poster child of what many enthusiasts hate about modern trucks.
But I can’t hate it. The Raptor R is so nonsensical and so stupid that it comes right back to being awesome again. It’ll do 100 mph anywhere, on any surface where there’s a straight enough line, and has a soundtrack ripped straight out of Jurassic Park. I’m impressed with what Ford’s engineers have pulled off, and I smiled every minute.
Top graphic image: Mercedes Streeter
I do love Raptors for the engineering that has gone into the suspension and how supremely comfortable they are on road due to that.
I’m just not a truck person so only enjoy them vicariously. I legit can’t imagine daily driving something that gets 14mpg best case. Even on Fuelly the best recorded result for one is 16mpg.