While your previous experience may, or may not be informative, you’re making some assumptions and some of them may eventually be borne out, but some of them may also be disproven. You may not have a fuel problem per se, you may have regional additives to the fuel that are ******** up the burn, or you could have defective knock sensors. Or both.
I’ve run nothing but 87 in my Raptor since I got it, and there has been no babying. I have not been shy about throttle. This will be my 3rd unnaturally aspirated vehicle, and while there’s always a chance of bad gas, there’s also a chance you could stumble upon a vehicle with a bad knock sensor(s). I was skeptical that the truck would run on 87 unleashed in anger, but I’ve not had a hint of issue.
As others have posted here, the manual gives you the --minimum-- octane level to use. The truck should run properly on this grade of fuel and if it doesn’t, that’s why there’s a warranty. Now, if you mod the truck, no matter how minor you might think it is, you should budget for higher octane fuel. If it’s in the manual, you can bet the Ford tested that requirement from Alaska in the winter to the Mojave desert and everything in between including hauling payload in the bed, maybe even towing a trailer to boot. Because they really don’t want to be doing warranty work to make 7500-10000 trucks run on regular fuel. Will there be some that won’t run on 87 octane? Sure, but this is a truck, not prius, it’s made to work not sit around and look pretty.
Time will tell how this shakes out, but for now I’ll defer to the folks who engineered and built the truck.
