2026 Roush Nitemare First Test: The 705-HP Ford F-150 That Drives Like a Muscle Car

The American muscle car is in a sorry state. Chevy once again killed off the Camaro (though it’s returning soon, again), and Dodge has chased away diehard Mopar fans with its electric and six-cylinder Chargers. That’s left Ford as the only shop in town selling burly American coupes with snarling V-8s up front. Even wilder: Performance tuner Roush, which first started supercharging Mustangs some 30 years ago, is also out of the muscle car business—at least for the moment. The Michigan-based performance engineering outfit still sells parts for Mustangs, but it no longer builds turn-key 700-hp specials like it did for the last-gen pony car. As with pretty much the rest of the American auto industry, Roush has turned its attention to trucks.

Here’s the thing, though: If we blindfolded you and sat you in the passenger seat of Roush’s bestseller, the Ford F-150-based Nitemare, we could trick you into thinking it was a muscle car. This 705-hp street truck does a damn good imitation of a front-engine, rear-drive performance car in the way it sounds, the way it turns, and especially the way it accelerates.

Push both the brake and gas pedals to the floor, and the Nitemare’s 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 feels like it’s going to rip the driveshaft right out of the truck. Lift your left foot, and the roaring engine launches this truck to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. Roughly 10 seconds into the run and still 300 feet shy of the quarter mile, the Nitemare crashes into Ford’s 106-mph governor. Keep the speedo pegged, and you’ll stop the timer in 12.1 seconds, making the Nitemare every bit as quick as a Ford Mustang Dark Horse and that other 700-hp F-150, the Raptor R.

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What Makes the Nitemare a Muscle Truck

Roush sells its vehicles through roughly 300 Ford dealers, allowing you to finance them just like any other new car. The Nitemare comes in two specs. Regular-cab trucks like the one tested here are built off the base F-150 XL with four-wheel drive, while crew-cab trucks start life as XLTs. Either way, the Nitemare upgrades add $22,999 to the price of the truck. That buys you a suspension overhaul with new anti-roll bars, dampers, and progressive-rate springs that drop the front of the truck 3 inches and the rear 5 inches for that perfectly level sport-truck stance. It also includes 22-inch wheels and tires, a cat-back exhaust system, slotted brake rotors, and all the interior and exterior dressing you see in our photos.

That price does not, however, include the most important part. Due to emissions regulations, you must sign the paperwork to purchase the truck first, and only then can the dealer install Roush’s supercharger to boost Ford’s Coyote V-8 from 400 hp and 410 lb-ft of torque to 705 and 635, respectively. You’d be crazy to buy the Nitemare without it.

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It’s Got the Grip to Match the Go

To wrangle all that grunt, the Nitemare rolls on 305-width tires at all four corners. The all-season General G-Max AS-07 rubber dug in far better than we expected, with the Nitemare hanging onto corners with 0.90 g of stick. That’s just 0.01 g behind the grippiest truck we’ve ever tested, a 1,025-hp Rivian R1T Quad wearing Michelin summer tires.

The two-door Nitemare carries 61 percent of its 4,766 pounds on its front axle, so it’s not surprising that the truck wants to understeer if you try to turn using only the front tires. But you don’t buy a truck capable of sending this much thrust to the rear wheels just to steer with your hands, right? Stab the gas mid corner, and the Nitemare will make a delightfully hard and smoky pivot.

All this awesome isn’t without trade-offs. We like that the exhaust sounds as pissed off as a grizzly bear that’s been given a titty twister. But we do not like that during an 80-mph highway cruise, you might as well be in seat 30J of an Airbus A330, enjoying the dulcet drone of a General Electric CF6 turbofan. We wish Roush had installed an active valve system capable of turning down the volume in these situations. The Nitemare also rides like its rear springs are made of concrete when the 6.5-foot bed is filled with nitrogen and oxygen. Oh, and there’s a hitch on the back, but Roush doesn’t recommend towing with the Nitemare.

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A Unicorn in the Tuner World

At $79,039 all-in for the supercharged two-door, the Nitemare is reasonably priced—even if it isn’t exactly affordable. Despite its base-model bones, it doesn’t feel flagrantly cheap thanks in part to the standard 12.0-inch digital instrument cluster and large 12.0-inch infotainment screen. At its assembly shop in Livonia, Michigan, Roush reupholsters the cloth bench seat in black and red leather and replaces the Orkin-spec vinyl steering wheel with a sculpted, leather-wrapped piece. The fit and finish is polished enough to look like the Nitemare rolled straight out of Ford’s factory like this, and the cabin makes a good first impression. Spend time with the truck, though, and you’ll find plenty of reminders that it’s a stripper at its core. It’s missing some of the most basic amenities such as lighted vanity mirrors and a rear window defroster.

If Ford built a truck like the Nitemare, it would almost certainly charge more. That’s more than a hunch. Earlier this year we tested an F-150 Lobo equipped with the $10,250 dealer-installed 700-hp Ford Performance supercharger kit. That truck was a crew-cab model that weighed nearly 600 pounds more than the Nitemare, hit 60 in 3.9 seconds, and cleared the quarter mile in 12.4 seconds. It cost $71,735 and didn’t have the sound, the stance, and the suspension to match the motor. It’s easy to imagine Ford asking another $10K if it were to bring a Lobo to parity with the Nitemare.

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At MotorTrend, we’re very familiar with outlandishly priced tuner cars that overpromise and underdeliver on performance. The Roush Nitemare is one of the rare exceptions to the rule. It delivers near-OEM build quality and legitimately impressive performance backed by Roush’s three-year, 36,000-mile warranty.

The F-150 Lobo and Ram’s upcoming Rumble Bee lineup show that the Detroit automakers are once again turning their attention toward sport trucks. It makes sense, given that the industry has left so many muscle car enthusiasts adrift. Give it a few years, and you might be able to buy a truck similar to the 2026 Roush Nitemare direct from Ford, Ram, or Chevy. Until then, if you want a pickup that’s every bit as loud, quick, and in-your-face as a red-blooded American muscle car, your dream ride is a Nitemare.