Supposedly, they do everything bigger in Texas, and Ford appears to understand this better than other automakers. When the Texas Auto Writers Association asked automakers to send over their full-size trucks for a comparison test, General Motors sent over a pair of fairly typical Silverado models, one two-wheel-drive and one four. Toyota sent a Tundra Crew Cab with a short bed. Dodge sent a Laramie model Ram, apparently hoping the upscale cabin would win over the Texans. And Ford? Well, Ford sent a cartoonish beast of a truck. Ford sent a truck with three trucks' worth of rear suspension components alone. Ford sent a truck that costs as much as two trucks.

And so, the official 2010 Truck of Texas comes as no surprise. The winner is the Ford F-150 - sort of.

Autoblog explains, "Turns out that the F-150 was actually named this year's Truck of Texas, not the SVT Raptor model specifically." But the tested truck was a Raptor - something unlike any other truck in the automotive world. Come to think of it, it's something unlike a Ford F-150.

The trucks, PickupTrucks.com reports, were driven "head-to-head along a challenging dirt track, up and over rocky shelves and through water crossings and mud."

In those conditions, it's not surprising the Raptor won out. In a previous review of the truck, Autoblog wrote, "The Raptor's central function is to travel quickly over the desert, and it does that brilliantly." The desert "doesn't present a single terrain: berms, washboard, silt beds, dunes, rocks, ruts and holes all mix it up together." There are plenty of vehicles that can get across it, "But none of them, at least none that we've been in, could do what the Raptor does as quickly and as comfortably as we did it."

Texas Auto Writers Association President Harold Gunn insists the tests were fair. "The narrow, two-lane Texas county roads, along with the ranch roads, comprised of dirt tracks, with gravel, mud and rocks are not fabricated. These roads and driving experiences duplicate the real day-to-day use of the vehicles we evaluate," he told Pickuptrucks.com.

But, Jalopnik notes, "The "Truck of Texas" will not be driven or owned by the vast majority of Texan truck buyers." With a price tag equal to two F-150s, and a limited production run, it's not exactly a typical F-150.

It's far more extreme than the typical F-150. Then again, maybe that does make it the perfect Truck of Texas.

If you're in the market for a new car, check out the U.S. News rankings of this year's best cars as well as this month's best car deals.