Short Take Road Test
It was out in a scabrous field in southeast Michigan immediately following a Detroit Lions game in the early ’80s (a loss, naturally) when I became intimately acquainted with the roll bar of a Jeep CJ-7 Golden Eagle that my father was driving entirely too fast. And also quite drunkenly. We were out for a little white-boy, Sunday-afternoon hell-raising. But, as it turns out, 90 pounds of unbelted preteen boy launches easily from the back seat into the roll bar’s diagonal support—a ribs-to-steel contact not soon forgotten.
Now, there were any number of errors in the thinking that led up to that moment. They began with the Detroit Lions and continued on to the late-’70s fascination with hood stickers and alcohol, unbelted children, and, well, essentially every other aspect of this tale. But the real problem, of course, was that we weren’t in a Ford F-150 SVT Raptor SuperCrew.
Inside the SVT cab’s cavernous rear quarters, a boy could bounce around a fair amount without being ejected, maimed, or even lightly damaged. The boy would be even better off if he used one of the three three-point seatbelts back there. But, of course, that doesn’t really matter because the Raptor’s absurdly generous wheel travel and high-performance Fox shocks (or, if you insist, “Shox”) will soak up your average Michigan hillock without even notifying the passengers. And the new-for-2011 SuperCrew’s monstrous 145.2-inch wheelbase (11.9 inches lengthier than the already long Raptor SuperCab’s) would have further quelled the jiggles.
At 6284 pounds, the Raptor SuperCrew is 184 pounds heavier than the SuperCab version. Despite this, the SuperCrew is a tenth quicker to 60 mph (6.6 seconds) and through the quarter-mile (15.2) than the last Raptor SuperCab we tested. All ’11 Raptors are powered by the same 411-hp, 6.2-liter V-8. The big all-terrain BFGoodrich tires deliver the same 0.70 g on the skidpad in both versions, too. However, 70-to-0 braking went from terrible in the SuperCab (202 feet) to dismal in the SuperCrew (218 feet).
As your sole form of transport, this thing is going to be pricey. Real pricey. On my 47-minute-and-32-second, 48.8-mile, all-expressway morning commute, the SVT consumed 3.7 gallons of fuel and averaged just above 13 mpg. So for the day, I was in for 7.4 gallons of gasoline. On the upside, the SuperCrew comes with a big, 36-gallon tank.
Our test vehicle came loaded with a $2495 navigation system (with a comely, high-resolution screen) and a $2190 Luxury package that includes power, heated front seats and power-adjustable pedals, among other niceties. Hell, the Raptor even has a crystal-clear screen with layer upon layer of menus between the main gauges. Dig deep enough, and you can decide if you would like the truck to activate something called a “courtesy wipe.” By comparison, the Golden Eagle came equipped only with paint the color of root beer.All of this is to say that if my dad and I had been in a Raptor SuperCrew on that day, we’d have been going a lot faster when we broke something or someone.
