Texas Man Plows His Ford Raptor Into A Tanker Truck

Just because you have a powerful vehicle doesn’t mean you’re impervious to harm.

Ford Raptors are powerful trucks, but just like we’ve seen with other performance vehicles, in the wrong hands they can be downright deadly. One of the latest examples in a disturbing trend comes via El Paso, Texas where a man driving a Raptor T-boned a tanker truck, dying in the crushing aftermath.

Watch a Jeep go flying through the air as a felon runs from Georgia police here.

At about 5:30 am on July 30, investigators say 34-year-old Manuel Alejandro Gonzalez, the driver of the Ford Raptor, was speeding and ran a red light at the same time the tanker truck was turning left in the intersection. While Gonzalez died at the scene of the crash, miraculously his female passenger survived.

Many mistakenly believe because of their size and weight, full-size pickups like the Raptor will always win out in a crash. The unfortunate truth is commercial trucks are far larger and heavier, making a collision with one something no passenger vehicle will win. The faster you’re going, the more violent the crash will be.

As you can see from the OnScene TV and KVIA ABC-7 videos, the Raptor didn’t hold up at all when it T-boned the tanker. In fact, it would be hard to identify as a Raptor with how mangled the truck became. Again, we’re surprised the one passenger survived such a violent wreck.

This is one of the many reasons we’re not fans of street races and other activities that turn public roads into makeshift racetracks. For too many, the temptation to go fast, whether they have a particularly powerful vehicle or not, seems to be overpowering. Just know that speeding around on surface streets or the highway not only can pick you up a criminal speeding citation, you might also cause a fatal accident.