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Ford Unleashes a Beast With its New F-150 Raptor

With the way the economy is going, and the way gas prices have been lately, you’d think Ford was crazy to launch an all-new, high-performance pickup truck. Still, with their new SVT F-150 Raptor, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The main difference between the F-150 Raptor and other high performance pickups including the Dodge Ram SRT-10, the Silverado SS and Ford’s own F-150 Lightning, is this new truck’s intended use. While the others were fully-equipped to meet the demands of high-performance road driving, the Raptor has the off-road covered.

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This is a pre-runner style truck that can rip the trails and deserts with the best of them. The Raptor comes with all the necessary equipment to be a serious off-road weapon. The heart of the beast is a new 6.2-liter OHV V8, which should put out a square 400-hp and 400ft-lbs of stump-pulling torque.

The Raptor also benefits from its own sheet metal. From the A-pillar forward, it’s all Raptor and the body panels are shared with no other truck in the Ford lineup. SVT engineers also widened the truck by seven inches and raised it a couple of inches on Fox Racing aftermarket shocks. The Raptor also has new leaf springs and shocks, new front upper and lower-A-arms and a new, wider, thicker-walled rear axle to be able to cope with the off-road abuse.

All in all, this should be a great truck. Not a suburban pose-mobile, but an actual real truck that real truck fans can enjoy and use and abuse.  Though it seems limited, Ford reps assure customers this will be a competitively priced truck with a multi-year production run. No prices have been announced yet, but expect them to come in at about $40,000.

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Source: Motor Trend

Photos: Ford Motor Co.