Agreed! They sell like 50,000 F150s per month now. Whether or not they bring back the Raptor will depend on the engine. If Ford does not bring back a V8 then they may just kill the project as their customer based would be upset. No Raptor V2 and the current Raptor would be elevated to legendary status >> where a manufacturer produced something wild and crazy that sold well.
You're smoking crack if you think Ford is dropping a V8 engine totally from the market for trucks. Just because they're strongly supporting a V6 and ecoboost market, doesn't mean their eliminating the V8 market totally. They may be selling 60% of f150's with V6's, but the other 40% are V8's, and they aren't just going to willy nilly say "ah we don't mind losing 40% of our sales of one of our most successful vehicle lineups ever, lets hug a tree and cut 40% of our truck sales". The 6.2 may be gone but it doesn't mean they won't put an appropirate engine in a Gen 2 Raptor. With the truck shedding a considerable amount of weight from an aluminum body, plus more weight going from an oddball iron block big bore 2v 6.2 to an aluminum block 4v smaller V8, the power to weight ratio will probably be even better than a 6.2 in our heavy trucks and wipe the floor with ours.
I disagree.
Ford ran a 2015 aluminum F-150 in the Baja this year. It just had 2014 bodywork on it. Guess what motor it had. The new 2.7 EcoBoost. Guess what the new Raptor motor will be..
And guess what, they ran a 3.5 Ecoboost in the baja what 2 years ago, and that never made it into the 13 or 14 Raptors. Just because they ran the 2.7 EB in baja doesn't mean it's going in the Raptor. It just shows it was an excellent torture test to show what the engine could stand up to. Not necessarily that it's the next Raptor powertrain.
It comes down to the 2016 CAFE standards imposed on automakers. They have to get an average of 28.8 mpg. So don't be surprised if we see a return of the Ranger as well.
We can probably light our candles now for the Boss motor in F-150 at this time...as the last one rolled off the production line a couple weeks ago.
CAFE....do you know what the "A" in that stands for? Clue, you mentioned it in your post above......
AVERAGE. That's not average for every single vehicle average city/hwy mileage....the "C" stands for
CORPORATE average. The average of the corporate fleet of vehicles needs to meet that standard. So a low volume 2016 Raptor could get a ****** 12 mpg, so long as a high volume fiesta gets 40 mpg, and they can still meet their CAFE standards. Just because the CAFE standard may be 28.8 doesn't mean the Raptor needs to meet it. The corporate average needs to meet it.
That's another reason everyone should be estatic Ford is making a 2.7 Ecoboost, and has a ton of trucks with the 3.5 Ecoboost. That's helping them meet the CAFE standards, giving margin on what powertrains they can put into the GT350/GT500/Raptor/Etc. If Ford dropped all the ecoboost stuff, and only made V8 trucks and no V6's, their CAFE would take a huge hit, and the 6.2 would have died long ago or been so robbed of power with emissions and fuel economy regulations, that it wouldn't be putting out 411 hp.
