Very few, if any people, will actually need the capabilities of the New Raptor R. Boy am I thankful that we don’t have to buy cars based solely on what we need.
Ever since SVT still existed and the Raptor was named accordingly, I’ve contended that it is the American continent’s equivalent to the hot hatchback. Whereas the hot hatchback is generally seen in Europe as a classless vehicle thanks to things such as the Mini Cooper and the Golf GTI, that moniker is reserved for the humble pickup truck. Your landscaper could drive an old F-Series, and so does Alice Walton. The “Texas Cadillac” may still be a Suburban, but your clients will not be at all embarrassed if you pick them on a Ram, especially if it’s the “Starting at $60,000” Limited.
Unlike the IS500 I recently showed here, Raptors make no qualms about the fact that they’re the high performance version. Even the 700 horsepower RAM TRX may be dismissed by the uninterested populace as yet another brodozer taking more space than strictly “necessary” in a parking lot. But then again, the TRX is the culmination of FCA/Stellantis’s mission to put a Hellcat engine on everything that has a chance of supporting it. The Raptor’s brief is rather more defined: “What if Baja truck, but for the road?”
So you will end with a rather different body to comply with those requirements, huge tires, a suspension that shrugs off destroyed dirt roads by design and all potholes by happy coincidence. And a powertrain focused on performance more than bragging rights…until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6Baa-Xhg4
It’s hard not to conclude that the RAM TRX is the chief responsible for Ford’s sudden impulse to fit the Raptor with entirely too much engine. Entirely aside from the ridiculousness of such an endeavor, manufacturers seem to have realized that this is it: the crazy person outside of their collective headquarters screaming that the end of the ICE is near. And some of them have decided that it should go out with a bang.
Or rather, in this case, more like with a burble, spy videos do a great job of making the Raptor R sound amazing. With that plus the standard trophy-truck suspension, it will probably do honor to what Tanner Foust said about the first raptor: “It rides like a Cadillac, and it sounds like there’s a pack of Harley’s chasing you.”
Props to the people who will buy it, even when it’s going to be prodigiously expensive (The standard-issue raptor is already near-as-makes-no-difference $70,000. It will probably resurrect the magical days of single-digit city MPG. Logic pretty much dictates that the standard raptor will be the better vehicle to actually own and keep. And that’s why people should get the R. Nothing like a laugh as the dead dinosaur hegemony collapses around us in an orgy of insane fuel prices and BEV and FCEV fans screaming at one another while Joe averageBuyer reaps the rewards.
A soundtrack almost as glorious as the one coming out the back of that prototype.
