Harley-Davidson’s Half-Ton Hero

Harley-Davidson’s Road Glide Ultra is made for something better than California traffic. It’s made for 80-mph wide-open throttle with a loved one draped across the seat behind you. It’s made for packing a week’s worth of whatever and pointing yourself at a horizon, assured that you can find it. What it’s not made for is sitting at a dead stop in heat-sunk highway hell, idling while thinner, thriftier motorcycles blitz past, taking advantage of lane-splitting laws and four feet of nothing between a stopped-dead carpool lane and a somehow-more-congested fast lane.

For Harley's continent-crossing cruiser, this is a worst-case-use scenario. Its massive 1,750cc Milwaukee-Eight engine pours heat across your legs. All 937 pounds of baggage and fuel and speakers and electronics and chrome and steel—mass that typically makes for delightfully lazy hands-off stability—just wants to roll over and call it quits. And so do I. But it doesn't. And I don't. And with that agreed upon, everyone starts getting along.

The big Road Glide isn't the perfect tool for scything through Los Angeles traffic, but it's a damned fine thing to sit around on if you're not. The infotainment system plays nice with an iPhone, which can charge in a little glovebox on the right side of the fixed fairing. It gives you time to listen to the radio or appreciate the deep, red, bass-boat paint.

If the Road Glide Ultra can hold up under a 90-degree day of traffic torture, it’ll only get better on the open road. And it does. When traffic clears along the coast, the Harley gets to stretch its legs. Pacific Coast Highway near Santa Barbara is long and loping cruise-control country. Mellow sixth-gear bends in wide roads. It’s where the bike belongs. It’s where you turn off the stereo and where the big twin’s big rumble cuts loose.