The Harley-Davidson Motor Company beefed up its fixed-fairing Road Glide Ultra ahead of MY2019 with new electronic features along with a larger, more powerful Milwaukee-Eight powerplant. Built for long-distance work, the “Ultra” pulls from the top shelf for its touring tenacity with plenty of lockable dry storage and cushy appointments that let you share the fun with a friend in style and comfort. The factory adds the contemporary fairing to classic Harley looks to make the new Ultra a truly modern ride, but with the deep roots we expect from the MoCo.

2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra Design

Fans of the brand will recognize the abundance of classic FLHT DNA the 2019 Road Glida Ultra brings to the table. It starts off with the heavy touring frame and large front forks that are made to look even larger through the use of chrome beer-can fork skirts. The front fender is full-length, but the sides have been cut back to leave much of the front wheel plainly visible in a nod to the Harley custom culture.

Rather than mounting the usual fork-mounted Batwing fairing, the factory opted for a fixed frame-mount sharknose fairing that provides the same sort of protection but doesn't affect steering with its windage since the forces act directly on the frame. A broad, 13.5-inch windshield punches a generous hole in the wind, and it comes vented to minimize the vacuum behind the glass. That prevents the wearisome head-buffet effect where the pocket and slipstream meet.

As for lighting, a pair of Daymaker LED headlights part the night, and the technological wizardry continues around the backside of the fairing with Harley's Boom!Box GTS display. A full-color, TFT screen let's you pinch, poke and drag through the menus to manage your navigation and music options, even wearing glove or in wet weather. The Bluetooth connection networks with your smartphone so you can field calls while under way.

A quartet of round analog gauges deliver speed, rpm, charge state and fuel level with an LCD display for the trip meter/odometer and a host of LED indicator lights to finish off the instrumentation. While the infotainment system isn't exactly new, this version is twice as fast as the previous gen so there's less time wasted between startup and screen swaps.

Tall bars hold your mitts well clear of all that business to rest your hands in a comfortable position for most body types. That all combines with forward footboards and a deep-scoop seat to define a relaxed, upright rider's triangle. Hard bags and a Tour Pak provide 4.7 cubic-feet of storage, and the passenger is pampered by a wide p-pad, full padded backrest and fold-up footboards of their own.

2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra Chassis

The heavy-duty touring frame on the 2019 Road Glide Ultra is largely made up of mild steel tubing, but the backbone has a rectangular cross-section for strength and stiffness; important features on a bike that boasts a 1,360-pound GVWR. Comfort and safety come by virtue of the 49 mm, Showa Dual Bending Valve forks up front opposite an emulsion-style monoshock that delivers hand-adjustable variable preload as the only available ride-quality tweak.

ABS comes standard to help you manage the power of the four-pot calipers with 300 mm discs front and rear for a total of three anchors, two in front and one in back. Cast-aluminum “Impeller” rims round out the rolling chassis with a fat 130/80-17 to lead the way and a 180/65-16 to bring up the rear. Polished facets on the wheels offset the blackout paint to generate some visual interest and, again, touch on the custom scene. Also stock are front and rear crash bars that protect the bags and the engine in the case of a laydown and mount the lower fairings to complete the rider's protection, as well.

The 2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra comes equipped with the Milwaukee-Eight 114 engine.

The 2019 Road Glide Ultra hits the streets with a whopping 122 pound-feet of torque on tap that maxes out at three grand for low-stress cruising and a solid roll-on no matter which gear you're in. Power comes from the Twin-Cooled, Milwaukee-Eight 114 that, as the devilishly clever name suggests, displaces 114 cubic-inches (1,868 cc) to make it the second-largest production engine to currently come out of Milwaukee. Thankfully, the factory abandoned its Twin-Cam experiment and returned to the single-cam configuration. It brings back the good-old nosecone that was popular back in the day, and it has the added bonus of returning the twisted pushrod-tube geometry to the long-established norm for a Big Twin.

A quartet of poppets in each of the two heads open and close the combustion chambers – hence the “Eight” component of the name – with chrome rocker-box covers to finish off the top end. The jugs measure in at 102 mm for the bore and a 114 mm stroke. With a 10.5-to-1 compression ratio, you'll be at the premium hook, but it's worth it since it contributes to the overall power/fun factor.

A six-speed gearbox crunches the ratios and sends the power to the rear wheel via a carbon-reinforced drive belt. The slip-and-assist clutch provides a bit of backtorque mitigation to protect your rear contact patch. This all boils down to a combined fuel economy of a claimed 43 mpg, and top speed is approximately 107 mph, though individual results may vary.

2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra Pricing

You can score a 2019 Road Glide Ultra in Vivid Black for $27,689. The “Color” option runs $28,289, while the two-tone package goes for $28,789. At the top of the range is the two-tone custom paint that fetches $29,889. ABS, security and the premium radio options all come standard, but as usual, California buyers can expect to shell out another two Benjamins for the special emissions package.

2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra Competitors

It's hard to think of a more appropriate competitor for a Harley dresser than an Indian product, so it was a no-brainer to grab the Roadmaster for my head-to-head against the Road Glide Ultra. As far as the looks go, these two are birds of a feather since the Roadmaster follows the American tourbike design to a T. The biggest difference, of course, is the front fairing. Indian sticks to the batwing barndoor that swings with the front end in contrast to the fixed, frame-mount Harley fairing. You'll feel wind against the Roadmaster fairing in the steering.

The differences melt away behind the fairing as Indian delivers a comparable instrument console and touch-screen Ride Command feature. It does all the same stuff as H-D's Infotainment system to just about break even so no clear winner there.

Harley creeps ahead in the front suspension with its SDBV setup versus the fixed damping values on the Indian's stems, but in the rear, the Roadmaster is equipped with air shocks that deliver a very cushy ride with stepless preload adjustment. Just like the Ultra, the Roadmaster comes with stock ABS on all colorways with all-around, 300 mm discs and dual, four-pot anchors up front.

As for the price, the 2019 Indian Roadmaster rolls for $29,499 in its basic Thunder Black, and at the top of the scale, the two-tone Steel Gray Smoke/Thunder Black rolls for $31,499 with a couple of price breaks in between. Neither factory uses price as a selling point, but Harley, for a change, comes in the lesser-priced competitor.

He Said

“It comes as no surprise that the Indian falls so close to the Road Glide Ultra. Indian, under the Polaris umbrella, knows what Americans expect in our touring bikes, but at the end of the day, Harley ultimately defined the class. Gotta say I'm not a fan of the sharknose though; I like being able to steer my lights at a standstill, and the windage of the Batwing bothers me not even a little bit. Having said that, my objection is mostly about vanity, and I know plenty of you out there like the Shark.”

She Said

My wife and fellow motorcycle writer, Allyn Hinton, says, “The Road Glide Ultra is really one of the top-shelf touring bikes in Harley's lineup without going full-on into the CVO stable. The factory equipped it with the Milwaukee-Eight 107 in 2017 and now punches it up this year with the 114. You knew that had to happen. I'm not a fan of the sharknose fairing, but when you're sitting on it you're not looking at it. I do like that it's frame mounted so I don't have to compensate in the steering as much for crosswind like you would with a fork-mounted fairing. The stock seat is very plush and so comfortable, just the ticket for long-distance riding, and the Infotainment system, first introduced in the big 2014 Rushmore overhaul, was the hottest ticket on the planet at the time. While it's still an awesome system with a few little tweaks this year, Indian's Ride Command system is definitely a competitor.”

2019 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Ultra Specifications

Further Reading

Indian Roadmaster

See our review of the Indian Roadmaster.

Harley-Davidson Road Glide/ Road Glide Special

See our review of the Harley-Davidson Road Glide/ Road Glide Special.

Harley-Davidson

Read more Harley-Davidson news.