Spotted: Ford teases Ranger Raptor on the streets of Dearborn

Ford\'s hotted-up midsized pickup is not slated for a U.S. release... yet.

Months after its formal debut in Thailand, Ford appears to be trolling us by parading a right-hand-drive Raptor Ranger around the streets of Dearborn.

There's nothing here that we haven't already seen (save the bed- and cab-side decal package), so we'll spare you the flowery descriptions as it's otherwise an almost perfect clone of the show model.

Overseas, the Raptor Ranger is powered by a twin-turbocharged four-cylinder diesel engine--one that will likely never see our shores even if the Raptor itself is green-lit for U.S. distribution.

Instead, we suspect we'd see a scaled-down version of the EcoBoost V6 powerplant found in the Ford F-150 Raptor, likely based on the 2.7L V6 found in base model F-150s (and the Ford Edge ST, among others), though we suspect it would produce more power in this application.

We'd love to tell you that we have concrete evidence that Ford is preparing to announce plans to bring the Ranger Raptor stateside, but for now we're still playing the Blue Oval's waiting game. It still feels like a "when" rather than an "if," but we'll just have to wait and see.

Photos by Brian Williams.