“The faster you go the better it gets,” Tyler McQuarrie says with a smile, the bright hot desert of Johnson Valley reflecting in Ford's paid hot shoe's sunglasses. “I tell people that it’s like a speed boat. You want to get up on top of the waves.”
These are the thoughts echoing in my mind as I scream, at the top of my lungs, doing 70 mph over whoops and crests through that desert floor. Properly over. Like I was floating, and the Bronco Raptor floating with me. Screaming, and its 418-horsepower twin-turbo V6 screaming with me.
“BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
It’s funny that the Bronco Raptor, codenamed "Warthog" by Ford under development and nicknamed "Braptor" by us assembled press, gets better the faster you go. After all, this might be the fast version of a truck, but it’s still a truck. It’s designed to go out; out past where paved roads end; out past the subdivisions and strip malls and gas stations, past the farms and the dirt roads, all the way out; into nature.
Generally speaking, nature is better the slower you go. The human brain processes things at walking speed, and, simply, you see more the less distance you travel. With this Bronco Raptor, the most actual nature I experienced was when I got out to pee. I saw the scaly spines of Joshua Trees. I saw the webby fingers of tumbleweeds, clawing at the ground, here where the Earth is soft and porous and shifting and infirm. Back in the Bronco, it was all ablur. What were cacti became little green dots, background to the Wile E. Coyote life I was living at full throttle.
This is not to say the Bronco Raptor is not remarkable, and worthy of gawking at. The Bronco Raptor is impressive like the Hetch-Hetchy Dam. A great deal of engineering work had to happen for this showroom-stock truck to survive its intended terrain, as well as its climate.
First, the cooling. The Bronco Raptor makes the difficult seem easy. Idling all day under the sun, 100-odd degrees of ambient temperature, the air beneath it god knows how hot. It might be loud, the cooling fan blowing so hard it sounds like a med-evac chopper, but the temperature needle inside never climbs. That's a larger, more powerful electric fan to pull more air through the radiator, itself breathing behind a more open grille, with rubber seals on either side of the grille and vents in the hood to optimize air flow. Mark Lecrone, of Ford Performance, noted that his team made the grille as open as possible within Ford’s design constraints that it be easily to manufacture, look good, and also meet the body team’s “firm feel” requirements. If the Bronco Raptor's grille was only a few thin strands of plastic that bend to the touch, it’d hardly seem “Built Ford Tough.”
There is a second air-to-oil trans cooler as well, up from the standard Bronco’s one, and it did adequate work in keeping the trans cool. In fact, everything in these Braptors stayed cool, no matter how long we idled, how slow we went rock crawling, or how fast we went desert running. As well they should: Ford did its testing at ambient temperatures of 120 degrees, as Lecrone tells me, doing 62-mile laps of an unnamed California desert for hours on end.
Then there is the engine that requires all of this cooling. This is Ford’s 60-degree 3.0-liter V6, with upsized Garrett twin-turbochargers good for 418 horsepower and 400 lb-ft of torque. Both are “more than the target” Ford set, according to Arie Groeneveld, who ran the Braptor program. Not that you notice it while driving, but the Braptor is tuned for some degree of anti-lag, at least as Ford describes it. This is not a full rally system, something that would have its own plumbing to direct fresh air right into the exhaust manifold to combust fuel in the piping itself after your engine to keep the turbos spooling when you take your foot off the throttle. That kind of anti-lag is expensive to build, and expensive to maintain. That is, it blows ordinary exhaust manifolds to pieces. What the Bronco Raptor uses is more simple. “We crack the throttle to keep the turbos spooling,” as Arie tells me. The idea is while you may lift abruptly off the gas, instead of simply dumping all the boost you have present, the car’s electronic brain keeps the throttle going juuuust enough to maintain boost for when you go back to flooring the right pedal. “It’s going to feel transparent to the driver.” He’s right. This is an unobtrusively powerful truck. It’s not that it ever glues you to the back of your seat, it just always has enough power for you to do what you need to do. Out in the desert, the engine can give you much more speed than you might want to face.
After the engine comes the suspension. If it’s the cooling that keeps the car from melting its engine into a solid but expensive block of aluminum, it’s the suspension that keeps me from going end-over-end during my aforementioned 70 mph thrash. I remember the moment in fits and flashes, the Bronco Raptor floating over bump after bump, a deeply rutted corner through the sand, and my eyes up to the horizon, my hands waving at the wheel collecting some kind of small slide. It was not the only time I found myself catching the car on my little lap, nor was it particularly dramatic. It was just one of those things that your brain replays for itself, saving to the hard drive, maybe to remind itself that it’s alive.
A lot has been done to the Bronco Raptor in its transformation from regular Bronco. It is 9.8 inches wider, sure, thanks to the revised suspension geometry, and has 60 percent more travel in the front (13 inches in total) and 40 percent more in the rear (14 inches there.) These are easily-digested numbers. Behind them are a great deal of mechanical changes. The front shock towers are new to accommodate more vertical travel and the bigger Fox shocks with integrated reservoirs front and remote reservoirs rear, Live Valve tech means they are tuneable for high speed control and low-speed compliance. The steering column has new more rigid housing for rock crawling. There are skidplates running the entire length of the vehicle, as well as strengthened cross members in the frame front and rear for “jump protection,” as Ford puts it. You get a standard front swaybar, but it’s wider. The tie rods are upsized, and Ford had to beef up its halfshaft joints. Ford found out that the suspension was actually getting more travel than anyone expected, exceeding its own expectations, and the Bronco Raptors were experiencing halfshaft failures rock crawling. At full articulation, the half shaft joints just weren’t up to the task of transmitting all 440 lb-ft of torque to the wheels.
I say all of this in an act of frustration. I wanted to have a pithy thing to say about the Bronco Raptor, a vehicle that is pointlessly large and powerful for the job of getting you out past your edge-of-town car dealerships and into the great outdoors. I can't bring myself to write a full paean to California's natural grandeur, and the irony of a vehicle designed to blow through it at highway speed. This is because the Braptor is annoyingly good. It's sick! It's tight! I am still thinking about it weeks later, wishing I was four wheels up in the air again.
The people at Ford also set me up. They teased me! They save the best for last. First, we drove the Braptor on the road, winding up out of Palm Springs on Highway 74, taking switchback after switchback in a vehicle so large it threatened to hit rumble strips on both sides of the road at the same time. It was fun, in a silly kind of way, but I was easily outpaced downhill by a local in a BMW i3. The suspension is so soft that I did a panic stop and I was staring at the ground through the windshield. The most entertaining moment I had on pavement was wiggling the wheel at highway speeds just to feel the body oscillate on the frame oscillating through the suspension oscillating through the standard 37” BF Goodrich K02 tires.
Second, we ran a good section of the King of the Hammers route in Johnson Valley. The low-speed section. Multiple times we had spotters assist us on tricky, rock-crawling ascents and descents. A number of Braptors on hand (including my own) threw error codes on the rear diff lock, disengaging at will. Everyone made it up the worst grades even with the faults, sometimes spinning tires to get to the top of a particularly gnarly hill or two, maybe a testament to the independent front suspension and the beefy BFGs at each corner. Ford’s engineers lamented that someone in some other department had the bright idea to futz with the software the day before all of us journalists drove the cars and they worked fine before then, but I was still perhaps more amused by the Braptor than completely taken by it.
Third, we ran the Braptor on a short course on a pancake-flat chunk of desert floor, doing something like a giant autocross layout, guiding these 5733 pounds around a series of traffic cones. It was a good way of testing out the truck’s G.O.A.T. modes, but I quickly found myself switching out of the performance-optimized Baja mode and simply into Sport, just so I could slide the thing in 2H. I learned that the brakes are strong (dual piston calipers at the front, single in the back) and that the truck handles great if you don’t set it up for failure. The controls are sharp–the throttle pedal, the steering, the response of the engine–are all quick and direct. You just sit over a foot off the ground, with long-travel suspension and A/T tires. A decision you make has a repercussion 50 yards down the road. You have to set the Braptor up, set it up for corners long in advance to set it up for success. These were all educational exercises; they all showed what the Braptor can do. But they were not what had me laughing and howling, palms sweating, face beaming, eyes straining with joy.
That was the long course. The final act of the trip. What we had all been building to: high-speed running on the open desert, over bumps and jumps, through ruts and washes.
It’s fair to say it was transformative. It changed the spirit of the Bronco Raptor for me, and the Bronco Raptor changed the spirit of the desert. For all I can complain about how its high-speed spirit is antithetical to actually enjoying the environment, this is not the Pacific Crest Trail we are talking about here. This is 96,000 acres, Johnson Valley, and while I would love to find myself back again hiking or biking over its rocky mountains, I have no desire to walk for hours, days through its open country. It’s not something that exists on a human scale; the Braptor unlocks something in it.
Maybe that’s wrong! Maybe every inch of California doesn’t need to be optimized and made accessible for human consumption.
The more time you spend in California, the more you see that its natural splendor is not some god-ordained beauty, carved out like Yosemite and then sitting in stasis for the next few millennia. What we see today is a shell of its former self. The cute ag school town I grew up in used to be a flood plain. Levees keep it dry. Hell, the whole Central Valley was drained. The mighty rivers dammed. Soon, I’m sure, people will talk about the aquifers literally sunk dry to plump up bland pistachios and almonds. You think these all these date palms are native to Palm Springs? The Department of Agriculture brought them here over a hundred years ago and we’ve been watering them ever since. This state was all terraformed; now it is knocking on the door of desertification, or maybe just incineration. Wildfire season has not yet started at the time of writing this piece, but Californians now know to mark it on their calendars. How many millions of people came here on the promise of limitless plenty? How much stubborn damage has been done to keep the charade going? Let them all go. Blow the dams and the aqueducts, no matter how grand.
But there are still moments of tenuous wonder here, even knowing its artifice, a rainbow on a soap bubble climbing higher and higher into the sky. These are the Bronco Raptor moments. It’s unsustainable, and excessive, and destructive, and in these instants before the pop, breathtaking.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
