Roush Performance says its heavily modified, 650-horsepower Nitemare Ford F-150 is the world’s quickest production pickup truck and has the testing data to back it up. With a supercharged 5.0-liter V8 and a 0 to 60-mile-per-hour time of 3.9 seconds, the truck is faster than many sports cars on sale today. In the end, the real debate is—can this actually be considered a production vehicle?
Roush, the same company behind all sorts of over-the-top Ford trucks and Mustangs, says the Nitemare goes beyond any lowered street performance F-150 it has ever made. Its acceleration numbers are insane for such a large vehicle—somewhere around the same time it takes the Mustang GT to make a 0-60 mph run.
Roush is making the claim based on its own testing, which took place in June 2019 and involved professional racing drivers, journalists, and a team of the company’s engineers. The Nitemare 4×4 Supercrew pickup was also tested and achieved a 4.1-second 0-60 mph run, while the standard cab version shaved two-tenths of a second off of that time. In a press release, Jack Roush Jr. said that his company focused on more than just speed and power, engineering the trucks to be as refined and reliable as they are powerful.
Jack Roush Sr. founded Roush Performance after a career as a Ford engineer and a stint running a successful racing team. The company makes aftermarket parts and for the Mustang, F-150, Raptor, and SuperDuty trucks. The vehicles are modified by Roush and sold at a markup over the base MSRP, sometimes having been changed so much that the vehicle manufacturer is actually listed as Roush instead of Ford. The Nitemare F-150 adds $19,150 to a base F-150, and standard mods include a Roush supercharger, a sport lowering kit, 22-inch wheels, and a whole truckload of graphics and decals. There’s also an active exhaust with a console-mounted dial that opens and closes baffles in the pipes to customize the truck’s sound.
