18-02-2025
Ford's Raptors Won't Go Electric or PHEV Anytime Soon, Insiders Say
Ford offers some excellent electrified powertrains (and one full electric one, too) across its vast pickup lineup, but one place you don't see electrification taking place yet is in the off-road Raptor lineup. Don't expect it to happen anytime soon, either. A recent report from Australia's Carsales delves into the timing of an electric Raptor, suggesting it'll happen one day — but that day is aways off.
'Inevitable at some time in the future that there will be electrified offerings [of Raptor] … but we're still working through what that means,' Ford's head of the International Markets Group Kay Hart said.
Keep in mind that Hart speaks for all sorts of Ford's international markets, but the U.S. is not under that umbrella; the Raptor sold in those markets is the Ranger Raptor, though, a truck now sold here in the United States. Hart says the Raptor will continue to deliver better and more refined internal combustion engines in the short term, but puts no timeframe on when electrification might begin.
How Ford might go about injecting electrification into Raptor models on the road to full electrification is another open question. Justin Capicchiano, Ford Performance, SVE program manager, spoke about the downsides of a plug-in hybrid.
'A straightforward PHEV is probably not going to let you deliver what you want to do,' Capicchiano told Carsales. 'You have to put that battery somewhere, and the logical position is going to be somewhere out the back, and that's going to impact your off-road capability.'
It's not as though Ford's Raptor models are prime examples of Colin Chapman's maxim of simplify and add lightness, but adding on poundage without performance is an additional worry. 'Any battery-based system, you are looking at what the performance is like when the battery gets degraded,' Capicchiano said. 'Does it overcome the weight of the battery when the battery gets depleted?'
The large batteries and electric motors that make up a plug-in hybrid system add huge amounts of weight to cars – just ask the latest BMW M5. And once you run dry of electric power, you're lugging around a huge battery, hurting both performance and efficiency. That doesn't rule out the path of a traditional hybrid like the F-150 PowerBoost, however; while it doesn't offer the electric-only driving range a PHEV provides, the weight penalty is much less from its smaller battery.
For now, at least, we're happy to continue pounding around in the sand with Ford's V6- and V8-powered Raptors for as long as Ford lets us.
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