- 10 unregistered F-150 Raptors were stolen from a Ford storage facility in Michigan.
- Ford employees had left the keys inside the high-performance pickups.
- Police later recovered five of the trucks and apprehended four suspects.
Thieves in Michigan stole 10 brand new F-150 Raptor trucks fresh from the production line and Ford workers’ naivete helped make it easy. Each of the zero-mile pickups had the keys left in the cab.
The trucks were spirited away from a Ford storage facility in Woodhaven on Wednesday morning where they were left after being built and awaiting dispatch. An unoptioned Raptor stickers at $78,440 and local news reports suggest the total value of all 10 trucks was around $1 million.
Related: 2024 Ford F-150 Raptor Gets Aggressive Refresh, New Tech, And More Off-Road Hardware
It’s not clear how the gang entered the Ford compound, but police seem confident that they know how they escaped, and it wasn’t by sweet-talking the security guard on the front gate.
“It looks like they drove through a cyclone fence to get access to Vreeland Road, and once they got on Vreeland Road, they made their way to the freeway,” Chief Scott Fraczek of Woodhaven police told Fox 2.
“Believe it or not, the keys are left in the vehicle,” said Fraczek, obviously as surprised to discover that fact as we were.
“I would think that they would put in a better effort to make sure these high-dollar vehicles can’t get out of their lot.”
But while the thieves struck lucky with the keys, they weren’t as lucky when it came to the amount of gas left in the tank of each truck. It seems that Ford only puts enough gas in when it builds the Raptors to get them off the line and police soon found one of the trucks abandoned just off I-75.
And later that same day four more Raptors were recovered by police and four suspects apprehended from a gas station at Harper Woods, around 30 mins from Woodhaven. The 450 hp (456 PS) 3.5 V6 trucks are rated at 14 mpg city and 18 mpg highway by the EPA, so they don’t exactly sip gas.
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about vehicles being stolen from Ford facilities. Thieves stole four Mustang Shelby GT500s from the automaker’s Flat Rock Assembly plant in 2021, and then another four or five of the same model from the same site in 2022.
