I drove a $63,000 Ford Raptor pickup truck for a week to see if it lived up to the hype — here’s the verdict (F)

The F-150 is, of course, a fine and dandy pickup truck, and in its revamped, aluminumized form, I enjoyed it. Millions of buyers also like the Great American Truck.

The Raptor is a whole other ball game. There’s no way I could test it out under proper conditions, by busting around some seriously challenging unimproved roads or taking on Moab. So I went for a different tack: I drove it 200 miles round trip to Upstate New York. Twice.

Yes, that’s completely boring, I know, and a poor use of the Raptor’s considerable capabilities. But the truth is that a lot of Raptor owners aren’t going to bust rocks and deserts, so I thought the test was fair.

The truck was, surprisingly, a perfectly comfortable cruiser. Just looking at the massive, deeply treaded tires, you’d think that wouldn’t be possible, but in fact, all that travel in the shocks give the Raptor a reasonably smooth ride, even thought that’s 100% not what it wants to be doing. Throw in some pleasing tunes from both SiriusXM radio and the iPhone library, as well as a bit of streaming via Bluetooth and USB, and you have yourself a lovely drive.

Obviously, with that powerful, torque-y motor, if you want to get on it a bit, the Raptor delivers. It’s fun to pour on the power with a Ford Super Duty pickup, asking its huge diesel engine to give you the freight-train effect. With the Raptor, the experience is rather more like punching it in a Mustang, and no one is going to come away from a Raptor drive unimpressed by the Ford EcoBoost V6 turbo under the hood. The 10-speed transmission is snappy in manual mode and full auto alike.

The fuel economy isn’t terribly good, but you don’t buy this truck to save on gas: 15 city/18 highway/16 combined is all you’re gonna get. Such is life with the beastliest pickup in all the land. An auto start/stop system can lend an assist on this score, and the Raptor does boast a 26-gallon tank.

Beyond this, you have the deep and varied options list that’s available on Ford’s trucks, everything from shift-on-the-fly 4×4 to some useful off-roading features, including a special hill descent mode. Back on the highway, there’s Ford’s excellent adaptive cruise control, and while the seats are sporty, they aren’t overdone. Ford continues to have, in my opinion, the best seats in the business.

A high-performance Ford pickup has been around in one form or another since the early 1990s. The Raptor is the latest iteration, and its reputation thoroughly precedes it. I knew what I was getting into. But that didn’t make climbing up into the cab and slipping behind the wheel any less exciting. This pickup ain’t cheap. But performance comes at a price, and in this case, it’s worth it.