In the USA, pick-ups like these are incredibly popular.
That's because they're classified as trucks, instead of regular cars.
That means they don't have to meet the requirements around safety, but also around taxes like a normal car has to.
In the Netherlands? It's about the same story.
Imagine that you own a company. You could buy a pick-up without having to pay vehicle taxes,
and it would become pretty affordable. Relatively speaking that is,
because there isn't an official price list for this new Ford F-150 Raptor,
but if you grey import it, you can count on putting down about €80.000.
And I'm not including other taxes.
But for that money, you've got one of the most bizarre cars I've ever driven.
Let's discuss the hardware first. It's an old-fashioned ladder chassis with a rigid rear axle...
...and leaf springs. In the front,
we find a 3.5-litre EcoBoost V6. It's fitted with two turbo's, so it produces 456 European horsepower.
There's almost 600 Nm of torque to play with as well. Of course, it's got permanent four-wheel drive,
but it can be changed to on-demand four-wheel drive, or even rear-wheel drive.
You can manually adjust the rigidity of the rear differential, in the front you have an automatic Torsen-LSD.
In short; very serious all-terrain hardware.
So if you get it out of two-wheel drive and engage on-demand four-wheel drive, you aren't doing anything special but it's still ready to go off-road.
You can easily encounter loose sand, and you won't really notice anything.
You're just sliding across, the steering is off,
so you're trying to steer in the right direction, and with a little bit of throttle it actually works.
It's got a ten-speed automatic gearbox, so with low-gearing you've got twenty possible gears to choose from.
It's all incredibly easy, but you can do this with every single four-wheel drive SUV...
It becomes more interesting if you start to play with the modes.
There are a few modes for different kinds of terrain, you can engage low-gearing,
you can manually adjust the rear diff, and that's when you get a seriously capable terrain-worthy vehicle.
You can go through here, deep tracks, hills,
mountains, other kinds of terrain. It doesn't matter, because this thing can cross anything.
There isn't a mountain this car can't climb.
Even if you have the smallest off-road driving capabilities, and you can keep it going,
there isn't really anything which stops this car.
And that's very impressive, but it's still not what makes this unique.
It might go far, but a Land Rover is still able to do this as well.
But what really makes this car unique, is the 'Baja'-mode.
That's a reference to the Baja 1000, because that's what this car has been developed for.
The Baja 1000 is a race in which they blast through the desert with pick-up trucks, going at high speeds.
And I don't mean 40 km/h, I'm talking 100 km/h flat out.
Earlier this year, Ford competed with a nearly standard Raptor.
The only differences were a roll cage and a different fuel cell, because of safety measures.
Other than that, the Raptor was completely standard.
But anyway, they competed in the Baja 1000.
And it didn't just finish, it finished well.
That's where this thing goes completely crazy.
What makes the Baja 1000 so heavy, is the amount of loose sand you have to fight your way through.
And that has to happen with a lot of speed, which means the suspension is constantly working to absorb the hits.
That's also why these tires are this huge. The wheels are already 17",
and then there's a whole tire around it. That's absurd.
They also feature locks, so if you're deflating the tire and it doesn't have much tire pressure,
the wheel doesn't turn around in the tire. So you can really lock the tire to the wheel,
which makes sure you have maximum traction.
The shocks under there are huge things filled with oil, designed to absorb hard hits all day long...
while you can have incredible amounts of fun, when racing through terrain with idiotic speeds...
That looks a little like this...
This is something you can't do in a Range Rover, not at this speed at least.
If you're done plowing the coastline from Hoek van Holland to Den Helder, you still have a very practical truck in the Raptor.
Behind me, you've got a very royal rear seat which seats three,
or a lot of luggage. Also, you've got a big pick-up bed,
which is about as big as something they call an apartment in Amsterdam these days.
It's incredibly luxurious as well, and even though the finishing isn't too good,
but everything's on here. Everything and more.
So yeah, it's very comfortable,
because the big spring rate absorbs every little bump, the ten-speed automatic gearbox is very smooth,
the 3.5-litre V6 EcoBoost produces enough power... It does like to rev,
but it's got enough torques in the lower RPM's, so you'll be able to keep going anyway.
It's actually a pretty nice car to drive.
The handling even is... No it isn't good.
It feels distant, big, heavy, and that's the moment you remember you're in the Netherlands.
Unfortunately, it doesn't consist of only deserts and highways.
We've got back roads, city centres, gas stations...
And you'll be visiting gas stations quite often. Every 700 or 800 kilometres.
And when you visit, you'll be putting 136 litres in its tank.
Oh yeah, it consumes a lot of fuel.
Also, it's just too big. It's almost six metres long,
more than two metres wide, two metres high, so you just don't fit anywhere.
So yeah, the Ford Raptor.
I'll admit it's one of the most impressive cars, or I should say trucks, I've ever driven.
In the terrain, this thing can do things no other car or truck can do.
But it isn't a bad thing it'll remain in the United States, because for the Netherlands,
its thirst and its size is a tad, or a really large tad too big.