This is no suprise at all in a truck.
Run a dyno on a tuned sports car (any thing with high compression, forced induction or that has a very high redline) and you will see vastly different results between Reg and Premium. This includes everything from your basic mustang GT Camaro SS all the way into your luxury performance sedans like the S5,M4,RCF and of course modded cars with 93 oct tunes.
For average Joe sedan snore-mobile or the milenial hates-cars shitbox on the road however regular is what you should run and always was, nothing has changed.
The reasons are largely for the horsepower improvements in performance cars you get under load. No one buys a 662hp GT500 and keeps it under 3,000rpms all day.
To my knowledge there are no naturally aspirated v6 or v8 truck engines that see much of a benifit of premium. Truck engines are tuned very differently from the factory. That can change if you dont run a stock tune of course.
Forced induction changes the game, If i was running an ecoboost i would ABSOLUTELY run premium.....at the very least you should run premium when the temps get above 80 degrees or if you are hauling or towing.....being these are still trucks...they are still detuned justa bit for safety so the margin of error is better than with sports cars. For that reason you might get away with running regular in your 17 raptor between october and march. I still wouldn'tdo it from april to september.
The 5.4, 5.8, and 6.2 Liter atmospheric engines are fine. The most extreme example of towing a heavy load up black mountain on a 100 degree day would make me run premium but thats about it.
Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk