Ford Ranger Raptor Review: Is It Worth the Money in the UK?

Is It Worth the Money?

Spent a week with one recently and still can't decide if it's the best vehicle I've driven this year or simply the most absurd. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive with the Raptor. At around £59,000 for the V6 before options, it costs roughly the same as a mid-range BMW 5 Series, takes longer to park, and will average somewhere around 21mpg on a good run. Ford knows this. They built it anyway, and there's a particular kind of buyer who will not need any further persuasion once they've sat in one.

But nearly sixty grand warrants a proper look. So here is one.

V6 Petrol or Diesel?

Petrol. That's the answer. The rest of this section is just the reasoning.

The diesel Raptor exists, and technically it's cheaper to run. But opting for it means losing the FOX adaptive dampers that are exclusive to the V6 model, and those dampers are not a nice to have. They are the mechanical reason the Raptor drives the way it drives. Without them you have a Wildtrak with a body kit, which is a decent vehicle and not what you're paying for.

The V6 is a 3.0 litre twin turbo producing 292PS and 491Nm of torque, with 0 to 62mph in 7.9 seconds. The diesel does the same sprint in 10.5 seconds. Both run a 10 speed automatic.

Worth knowing before you get too excited about the V6: in Australia, where this truck was largely developed, the same engine makes 392bhp. In the UK, petrol particulate filters and emissions rules cap it at 288bhp. That's a 100bhp shortfall from the same motor. You notice it not as a lack of power exactly, but as a slight flatness when you expect the engine to dig in and it doesn't quite. It sounds right. It just doesn't always feel right.

The official WLTP figures from What Van?'s road test put the diesel barely 0.1mpg ahead of the V6 in combined testing. Less than nothing. Buy the petrol, accept the fuel costs, and don't agonise over it.

What It's Actually Like to Drive

On the Road

I'll be honest: I expected it to be terrible on British roads. Something developed for Australian dirt and Baja sand has no obvious reason to feel composed on the A5 through Northamptonshire.

Wrong about that.

Coming off the roundabout at Weedon Bec on a cold Tuesday morning, there's a stretch of patched and repatched tarmac that my own car, a Golf, always makes me wince through. I found myself bracing for the Raptor to crash and tramline its way through it, gripping the wheel out of habit. The jolt never came. It just rolled through, settled, and carried on. That's the FOX suspension doing exactly what Ford engineered it to do, reading the surface ahead and adjusting the damping in real time. Whether you're in the market for a Raptor or not, that bit of engineering is genuinely impressive.

The steering is heavier than you'd expect. Deliberately so. It communicates better for it, and at low speed in car parks you feel every degree of lock, which matters when you're manoeuvring something this wide. Nearly 2.2 metres across the mirrors. A standard UK parking bay is 2.4 metres wide. The turning circle is also wider than you'd want in a multi-storey and I resorted to a three point turn in a space where most vans would have managed in one go.

On a fast A road the Raptor settles into a surprisingly authoritative cruise. The 10 speed automatic is good at its job most of the time, but ask it to make a decision mid corner or during a rolling overtake and it occasionally drops two gears when one would have done, or hesitates before doing anything useful. Leave it alone and it's fine.

Off Road

Most Raptor owners will never find out what this truck can properly do, and the ones who say they will probably won't either. But on a rough green lane in the Peak District on a November afternoon, with the surface somewhere between gravel and puddle, the difference between the Raptor and a standard Ranger is not subtle.

Startling, actually.

The standard truck picks and bounces and makes you slow down. The Raptor just keeps going at a pace that feels mildly irresponsible until you realise it's completely in control. Rock Crawl mode is worth using on rough ground because it actually changes how the vehicle behaves rather than just moving a number on a screen. Throttle mapping softens, the diff locks engage differently, the steering weights up. I came down a rutted slope in Wales that I'd normally take at walking pace and did it at something approaching a trot without drama.

Wading depth is 850mm. Most Raptor owners will never use that either.

The Cabin and the Load Bed

The interior is genuinely good.

A 12.4 inch digital instrument cluster, Ford's SYNC4 infotainment on a 12 inch portrait touchscreen, sport seats with proper lateral support, leather, contrast stitching. It feels more like a Range Rover Sport inside than a truck, which is either a selling point or an indictment depending on your views on what a pickup should be. Sat in it for the best part of three hours on a motorway run to Manchester and arrived less tired than I do in some executive saloons.

James runs a civil engineering firm near Shrewsbury and bought one on the basis that he'd use it for work Monday to Friday and off roading at weekends. He still owns it. He stopped using it for work inside a month. "The lads were putting bags of sand in the back and I was watching the payload creep up toward 600kg and thinking, if something goes wrong here I'm in trouble," he told me. "Now it's just my personal motor." That's probably the most honest summary of the Raptor's commercial utility I've heard.

652kg payload. A standard Ranger XLT carries 1,099kg. The Raptor's suspension modifications make reaching the 1,000kg LCV threshold impossible without undoing the engineering that makes the truck worth buying in the first place. Ford made a choice, and that choice has consequences. The load bed is a decent size, roughly 1,575mm long and 1,515mm wide, narrowing to around 1,190mm at the wheel arches, with a 400W inverter, bed rail ruler, and tailgate clamp holes built in. It'll take a Euro pallet at a push.

Running Costs

The WLTP figure is 20.4mpg. Long term real world testing from multiple outlets lands somewhere between 21 and 22mpg on mixed driving, dropping toward 17mpg if you spend meaningful time in Baja mode or town traffic. On an 80 litre tank that means roughly 350 to 380 miles of range on a sensible run. Not ruinous for what it is, but you'll notice it.

The Tax Problem

This is where it gets properly expensive for anyone running the Raptor through a company.

Because the payload falls below 1,000kg, HMRC classifies the Raptor as a passenger car rather than a light commercial vehicle. No VAT reclaim on the purchase price. BIK calculated at car rates rather than the flat commercial vehicle rate. The V6 produces 315g/km CO2, which puts it in the 37% BIK band. For a 40% taxpayer that's a bill of around £8,880 per year. The flat annual rate for qualifying commercial vehicles is a fraction of that. The Raptor gets none of the tax advantages that make most pickups attractive to businesses.

One small saving: the DVLA still classifies it as an LCV for VED purposes, so road tax rates are lower than for an equivalent car. It also means van speed limits apply on some roads, which owners occasionally discover the hard way.

For private buyers there's no BIK to worry about. But anyone expecting the Raptor to function as a tax efficient company vehicle will find it doesn't. There's no clever workaround.

Insurance, Servicing, Tyres

Insurance group 43 out of 50. Worth noting that the related Volkswagen Amarok Aventura sits at group 45, so it could be worse, but premiums will still be well over £1,200 a year for most drivers, more if you're younger or in the wrong postcode.

Service intervals are 12 months or 12,500 miles, and main dealer costs sit at around £350 to £400 for a major service, in line with a premium SUV, which is roughly what the Raptor now is. The BF Goodrich KO3 all terrain tyres were developed specifically for the Raptor and replacing all four is a four figure job. They also wear faster than road tyres if you actually use the vehicle off road, which creates a slightly ironic situation where enjoying the vehicle accelerates the cost of running it.

Running costs at a glance:

• Fuel economy of roughly 21mpg becomes significant cost above 15,000 miles per year

• Insurance group 43 versus the standard Ranger's group 37 to 42 range

• Four BF Goodrich KO3 tyres when they need replacing: expect £1,200 or more

• BIK at 37% car rate for company drivers, no LCV flat rate available

• Main dealer servicing around £350 to £400 per year

• Full VAT on purchase, no reclaim possible for business buyers

Browse current used stock on our Ford Ranger Raptor for sale page.

Who Should Buy One

Not anyone who needs a working pickup.

If you're a builder, a farmer running livestock, a landscaper who needs genuine payload capacity and a clean tax position, buy a Ranger Wildtrak or a Hilux and spend the difference on something useful. The Raptor will frustrate you before the first service.

The buyers who will get the most from it are the ones who've thought about it differently from the start. Someone who wants a daily driver with genuine off road capability and doesn't want an SUV. Someone who tows a horsebox or a trailer on weekends and wants something that can also do a trail day without embarrassing itself. Someone, honestly, who just wants the best engineered pickup in Britain and can absorb the fuel costs without too much pain.

Spoke to a marketing director from Chester who'd owned two standard Rangers before moving to a Raptor. "I knew the economics were wrong," he said. "I bought it anyway. Best vehicle I've owned." That's a fairly common story among Raptor owners, and it tells you something about what the truck actually is.

It's the strangled version. That 392bhp the Australians get from the same V6, you feel its absence on long straight roads when you want more and the engine quietly declines to provide it. That's a genuine frustration and worth acknowledging. But even at 288bhp, with the FOX suspension underneath you, the Baja exhaust mode on a good B road, and the sheer solidity of the thing around you, it delivers an experience nothing else in this category comes close to.

The question isn't really whether it's worth the money in some objective sense. It's whether it's worth the money to you, which is a different calculation entirely and one only you can make.