Reality Sucks! Ford F-150 Raptor Already Sold Out -- February 4, 2017

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What A Great Country

The Ford F-150 Raptor: over at The Wall Street Journal:

While it's majestic in every direction, the 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor pickup is especially awing in width, in its improbable distance from one shining headlamp to the other. This, the second coming of Ford’s delightfully frivolous man-toy, or “high-performance off-road truck,” starts life with an already ample F-150 steel frame, widened with a half-foot gusset of structural steel down the middle.

Truck nuts—you don’t mind if I call you that?—will recognize the Raptor’s widescreen aesthetic as inspired by Baja trophy trucks, which are not trucks at all but specialized tube-frame racers, driven by insane millionaires who have lost all feeling in their buttocks. The added span between the wheels has distinct mechanical advantages having to do with high-speed off-roading and wheel articulation, which I’ll get to as soon as the Raptor brings back the sun.

Oh man, somebody took their girthy pills. The front fenders bulge bigly over the BF Goodrich all-terrain tires, which themselves stand almost 3 feet tall. The truck’s self-love is celebrated with blueprint-like block lettering, FORD, spanning the grille as if it were written in Panavision (and at night, bracketed by torrid amber light bars). 

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