Two pickup trucks with muscle-car engines and trophy-truck suspensions square off at the dragstrip, on the road, and in the dirt.
No matter which side you’re rooting for in the great 700-hp pickup-truck throwdown of 2023, you have to hand it to the other team. If Ford and Ram hadn’t goaded each other into building increasingly ludicrous trucks, there wouldn’t be any 700-hp, dune-jumping pickups at all. The way we see it, without the original 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor there is no Ram 1500 TRX, and without the TRX there is no Ford F-150 Raptor R.
It’s a classic case of competition improving the breed. After 13 years of escalating stakes as Ford and Ram antagonized each other, the humble pickup truck has evolved into a street-legal sandrail with sport-sedan acceleration.
Such a specific and unique mission brief doesn’t leave much room for creative interpretation apparently, because the TRX and Raptor R are conceptually identical. Both trucks use supercharged V-8s, with the Ram 1500 TRX making 702 horsepower to the Ford F-150 Raptor R’s 700. Both trucks bound over desert washes and crawl up boulder-strewn trails with 13 and 14 inches of front and rear suspension travel. And both trucks in this test cost six figures. There’s a $23,360 chasm between the TRX’s $85,785 starting price and the Raptor R’s $109,145 entry point, but Ram essentially closed that gap by delivering a $103,980 truck for this comparison. Those extra options make for a more luxurious and more livable TRX without altering its performance or the driving experience.
Comparison tests are rarely this evenly matched. To draw out the differences between the TRX and Raptor R, we flogged them at our Michigan test track and then rocketed 200 miles north to their natural habitat. On winding, rutted trails topped with loose sand and slick snow, we activated each truck’s Baja mode and stood on the throttles. This is what we found.
Predator Vs. Hellcat
Originally designed for the Mustang Shelby GT500, Ford’s Predator engine trades power for torque in the Raptor R, although you’ll never notice the 60 missing ponies. The 5.2-liter V-8 revs to its un-trucklike 7,000-rpm redline as if it’s bolted in a mid-engine Italian exotic. Stomp the go pedal, and the R unleashes its fury like a collapsing dam lets go of water: all at once, and then in a torrential flood. Sixty mph disappears in 3.7 seconds, and the quarter mile flashes by in 12.1 seconds at 111.8 mph. Neither of those numbers captures the intensity of the thrust, though.
The Predator is so instantaneous, so linear, so unrelenting in its power delivery that you could mistake it for a pair of electric motors if every poke of the throttle didn’t unleash a heroic eight-cylinder thunder. Even cruising at part throttle, there’s a constant rumble that can’t be ignored. On any highway drive longer than 10 minutes, you’ll be thumbing the steering-wheel-mounted switch for the active exhaust’s Quiet mode.
If only there were a similar button for silencing the supercharger belted to the TRX’s Hellcat 6.2-liter V-8. The Ram’s twin exhaust cannons deliver a righteous big-displacement boom, but you’d never know it from inside the cabin where the supercharger’s high-pitched wail drowns out the fusillade in the combustion chambers. You have to be standing outside the TRX to hear the good stuff. It sounds more fierce from a quarter mile away than when you’re sitting inside it.
At the dragstrip, the Hellcat’s two-horsepower advantage is crushed by the extra 740 pounds the TRX lugs wherever it goes. It arrives at 60 mph 0.2 second behind the Raptor R, with that gap doubling through the quarter mile.
From the driver’s perspective, the difference is more noticeable in the first few heartbeats after standing on the throttle. Where the Raptor R catapults off the line, the Ram builds momentum the way you would expect a 6,700-pound truck to launch—with the slightest hesitation as all that mass is put into motion. Once it’s rolling, though, the TRX delivers the same towering mountain of torque we’ve come to know so well in every other Hellcat-powered car.
The Ford’s 10-speed automatic has two more gears than the Ram’s transmission and sometimes seems like it shifts twice as often. The gear changes are at least fast and assertive, and the shift logic is sound. Ten really only feels like too many when accelerating from a stop in heavy traffic with light throttle, when the Raptor races to the highest gear and the upshifts come in rapidfire succession. In any other scenario, the Ford’s eagerness to downshift comes off as making the best use of that rev-happy engine. Compared to the Raptor, the TRX is content to hold a gear (or at least not downshift to as low of a gear) and dig from lower rpm at part throttle.
And then there’s the one difference so significant, it feels philosophical. Whereas the TRX is permanently stuck in four-wheel-drive, the Raptor allows you to clown around in rear-drive. Actually, Ford seems to encourage it, since the Raptor defaults to two-wheel drive in its Normal mode. In anything less than fourth gear, the Raptor R’s BFGoodrich All-Terrain KO2 tires are hopelessly and hilariously undermatched for the Raptor’s 640 lb-ft of torque. It’s perfect for flinging rooster tails of dirt into the next county and sending up mushroom clouds of tire smoke.
The Big Squish
The Raptor R rides on a suspension as squishy as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s breadbasket, taking pokes, prods, and full-force sucker punches from the terrain with a happy giggle. It’ll leave you cackling like a lunatic based on the way it skims across the landscape utterly unfazed. How is this thing so good? And who needs a truck designed for driving off-road at highway speeds?
No one without a professional racing license needs a truck this capable, but the magic of the Raptor R is that it’s so satisfying no matter how or where you drive it. It’s supple and settled at any speed, over any terrain. By making the small hits so inconsequential, the Raptor lulls you into pushing harder and faster, where the bigger hits are also inconsequential, so you push even harder and faster until your self-preservation instinct kicks in or you do something stupid enough to go viral on TikTok.
Compared to the pillowy Raptor, the TRX feels sports-car stiff. Treading over lumpy, rutted trails at a jogging pace, the Ram’s body rocks and pitches over small events that the Raptor irons flat. Just driving down a Detroit freeway will have you doubting every TRX jump picture you’ve ever seen. Surely dampers this unforgiving would punch through their mounts on touchdown, you think.
Speed helps the Ram’s suspension relax. Driving faster sends more force into the suspension, which uses more of the Ram’s travel to smooth out the bumps and chuckholes. You just have to be confident enough and committed to get to that point, which makes the TRX’s off-road athleticism less accessible than the Raptor’s.
The Ram steers better than the Ford, with a quicker rack that’s more responsive both on the pavement and in the slough. There’s a surprising amount of precision for any pickup, let alone one with knobby all-terrain tires and a penchant for off-roading.
The Raptor’s prodigious suspension compliance comes with an unwanted side of steering slack. You won’t notice it off-road, because who expects a three-ton truck to turn on a dime in the sand? On dry pavement, though, there’s a lag between turning in and cornering forces building. Ford engineers have made a valiant effort to mask this by making the steering firm and weighty on-center, so that your hands receive the fast feedback your eyes and inner ear expect.
The Raptor’s BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2s are widely regarded as the benchmark all-purpose off-road tire for good reason. In addition to digging into the dirt and finding grip, they’re well behaved on the roads, including being relatively quiet at highway speeds. We were equally impressed by the Ram’s Goodyear Wrangler Territory AT tires in the loose stuff, but they struggled to find purchase on snow-covered surface streets.
These chassis attributes are where the differences between the Raptor R and TRX are most clearly defined. Even with an extra 250 horsepower over the standard Raptor, the R keeps the engine and chassis in balance, just like the best sports cars. In the TRX, you get the sense that—like every other Hellcat-powered car—the chassis was at best a secondary priority. The Ram was designed around the engine, with the sales folks having full confidence that a giant power number would be enough to get our lizard brains salivating.
Living With Monsters
We have to admit that it works. The styling, the stance, the power, the sounds, the marketing—all of it works. We lust after trucks like the TRX and the Raptor R even though we know they’ll spend the majority of their miles trundling through the tamest driving environments we have. To keep the fantasy from ruining reality, a successful Baja basher needs to not suck to drive when the only mud they’ll touch is found at the bottom of potholes.
The Raptor’s sublime suspension goes a long way in fulfilling that brief. Turns out that tuning a truck to conquer the ungroomed wilds of Baja also sets you up for success on the jagged highways and arterial roads of the world’s richest country. Forget Rolls-Royce and its pretentious “waftability.” The Raptor R proves that, with the right hardware, you can make a glorified farm tool float over the road, too. The Ram team, though, hasn’t figured that out yet. With its stiff ride, the TRX doesn’t come close in on-road ride comfort. Even seemingly level expansion joints excite a constant up-and-down oscillation that makes it feel like you’re driving a Shake Weight.
The size of these beasts is both a blessing and a curse. The expansive cabs offer some of the most comfortable rear seats this side of a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. But the wide tracks, fat fenders, towering ground clearance, and limousine lengths make the TRX and Raptor a chore to pilot in suburban parking lots and on city streets. The Ford, with its humongous 50-foot turning circle, struggles to flip a U-turn in the space of a five-lane road. The Ram is only marginally better.
The Raptor R comes with standard running boards that make climbing aboard easy enough, but if you’re buying a TRX to cure a Napoleon complex, you should know that at 6-foot-3, I felt short every time I had to hoist myself into the cabin. The truck in this test wore optional $995 rock rails that offer a narrow ledge to hang a toe on, except they’re too high to practically use as a step and totally useless once they’re caked with mud or snow. We suggest you spec proper running boards or bring your own step stool.
Finally, there’s the matter of price, the only thing more outrageous than the capabilities of these trucks. The Ford’s $109,145 starting ask can only be justified by the fact that enough people will still buy it at that ridiculous sum. That number mostly feels like someone at corporate is looking to get their cut of the outrageous dealer markups we’ve seen in the past two years. The Raptor R isn’t just the most expensive non-GT Ford you can buy today, it’s more expensive than every Lincoln save for the Navigator Black Label. And yet, inside and out, the Raptor R looks as if it were designed first and foremost so that it can someday be faithfully re-created in a 56-piece Lego set. The blocky styling and basic materials don’t live up to the price.
The Ram’s more muscular exterior and more artful interior are more our style. Unfortunately, that means living with Ram’s infotainment system. Once a bastion of simple, functional design, Chrysler’s FCA’s Stellantis’ Uconnect is not aging well. As the touchscreen has grown to 12 inches, the icons appear to have shrunk, requiring more eyes-off-the-road time to find and tap. A vast swath of unused screen real estate is filled with a hokey diamond-plate pattern. The system has also proven to be reliably unreliable in pretty much every current-generation Ram we’ve driven. This particular truck suffered from the disappearing audio syndrome, where Uconnect randomly refuses to play sound from any audio source for several minutes at a time.
The King Of The Dirt
Picking a winner in this contest is really just a formality. In the battle of TRX vs. Raptor R, everyone wins. Well, maybe not the environment. The Raptor R and TRX sucked down $650 worth of dino juice in less than 36 hours—and that doesn’t include the gas that powered 12 full-throttle runs to triple-digit speeds we made during our performance testing.
Anyone who gets behind the wheel of either truck has won the lottery of life, even if it’s fleeting. Flogging the Ford F-150 Raptor R or the Ram 1500 TRX across the earth is one of the fastest ways to pure joy. Remember how you used to thrash your trucks in the sandbox as a kid? You’d bury them, splash through puddles, and drive up walls. In a Raptor R or TRX, that child’s play is supersized and made vividly real.
The Ram 1500 TRX packs a bruiser of an engine and a menacing, creatine-stuffed presence. But whether you’re buying for the muscle-car engine or trophy-truck suspension, the Ford F-150 Raptor R delivers better performance and a fuller experience. The Raptor R is so monstrously capable and wildly indifferent to the terrain that there is simply nothing else like it.
2nd Place: 2022 Ram 1500 TRX
Pros:Hellcat V-8Hellcat V-8Did we mention the Hellcat V-8?
Cons:Unforgiving ride qualityWhiny superchargerFussy infotainment system
Verdict: Following the Hellcat playbook, Ram’s 702-hp pickup prioritizes the engine above all else.
1st Place: 2023 Ford F-150 Raptor R
Pros:Terrain-conquering chassisIntoxicating engineBananas rear-wheel-drive mode
Cons:Steering could be more precisePriced like a luxury vehicleDoesn’t look or feel like its price
Verdict: Even a 700-hp V-8 can’t steal the show from the F-150 Raptor’s brilliant, drive-over-anything suspension.
