For decades purchasing a full dress Harley Davidson touring bike has been relatively straight-forward. There have been specific models like the Road Glide Limited, Road Glide Ultra, and the Street Glide Ultra that came pre-built with ‘full dress’ touring features. My personal bike for the last decade and a half has been a 2011 Road Glide Ultra, and when it came time to consider a replacement I was looking for the same set of touring features.

However, Harley Davidson has been making some unusual changes to their touring lineup over the past few years. These changes have made the choice of the ‘right’ Road Glide for me much less obvious and, to be honest, rather confusing. The Road Glide Limited seems to have become stagnant, falling behind in features- and there has been no obvious model to replace it.

The Motor Company is in the midst of a touring model transition that has left me rather confused. This post collects together what I have figured out about Harley’s touring lineup over the past two years as I’ve progressed through the process of picking out my next motorbike.

HD’s premier touring bike…

The Harley Davidson Road Glide is part of Harley’s ‘grand touring‘ line up. This makes sense: it was until recently the only HD bike with a frame attached fairing, and has for decades had dedicated models being completely fitted out with trunk (tour pack), saddlebags, large engines, and other long-range riding amenities.

I have also read in a few places that the Road Glide is Harley’s most popular touring model by a significant margin, outselling the Road King and Street Glide varieties. I am not sure if this is true, but again it also makes sense. Long range touring benefits greatly from a stable platform, and a frame attached fairing has obvious advantages in terms of dealing with cross winds and other common weather challenges.

And of course there is the simple fact that I own a Road Glide and have loved riding it over the past 14+ years. My old bike has close to 130,000 km of my own riding on it. It is still working perfectly well and my main purpose for replacing it now is to make sure I have an enjoyable riding platform for my retirement. I’m not really looking to move off the platform I know and love.

Touring is all about full dress

Riding a motorbike over long distances day after day is something that, in my opinion, is best done on what is called a ‘full dress’ bike. Going 500 kilometres on a nice sunny day is one thing. Doing that for 10 or 15 days in a row under unpredictable weather and road conditions is quite a different matter.

A full dress bike provides:

• a fairing: this grants protection from wind, some weather, and debris
• saddlebags: for storage
• trunk (‘tour pack’): for even more storage
• comfortable seat for rider and passenger: because long miles over multiple days will really do a number on you otherwise
• an upright or partially reclined riding position: to take strain off the back, shoulders, and arms
• a powerful motor: for easy cruising with a full load at highway speeds
• a stable suspension: for control and comfort at highway speed

There are a lot of bikes in recent years that have standard builds to meet these requirements. Examples include the Honda Goldwing, BMW 1600, Indian RoadMaster, and of course the Harley Davidson Road Glide Limited and Street Glide Ultra. All of these are excellent alternatives as are many others I haven’t mentioned.

What I want is a new full dress Road Glide. Actually, what I’m trying to have ultimately is a full dress Road Glide trike. I’ve considered the others but I have really enjoyed my old Road Glide. I don’t really feel like switching to another horse (bad analogy, but bear with me) mid-race. The Harley puts a smile on my face and, at the end of the day, that is what matters.

The new model picklement… and end of full-dress models

Harley introduced an all new Road Glide in 2024. This bike has a larger 117 cubic inch Milwaukee 8 engine (versus 114 ci in previous models). Of more interest to me personally is the fact that the new engine also incorporates full cylinder head liquid cooling. Prior Milwaukee 8 engines had valve seat liquid cooling only.

Additionally, the new 2024 Road Glides have a more aerodynamic fairing with a fully electronic dash. There are other improvements related to the suspension, but I’m less clear on the advantages of those. In short, the 2024 Road Glide looks like a major upgrade across the board.

Except… it wasn’t available in a dedicated full dress model. There was no ‘new’ 2024 Road Glide Limited: the ‘Limited’ model retained its old design, with a smaller engine and no fancy new electronics. More confusing is the fact that this outdated ‘Limited’ 2024 model has persisted into 2025.

This was a perplexing choice on Harley’s part: what exactly were they saying or planning by doing this? Are they getting out of the ‘full dress’ touring motorcycle business?

The one answer I could kind of tease out from the dealers: 2024 was the last model year for the full-dress ‘Limited’ Road Glide version, and at some point it would disappear entirely as a distinct model. This made no sense to me and, apparently, is a bit of a misunderstanding of what is changing.

How to get a 2025 full-dress touring Road Glide

It is true that Harley is no longer offering a new Road Glide Limited ‘full dress’ model: I expect it will be gone entirely from their web pages sometime in the next year or so. But this does not mean that they intend to stop making full dress Road Glides. Instead, the features that make up ‘full dress’ capability are now an option for the base model Road Glide from 2025 onward.

It seems to me that Harley is being a bit coy about this whole change, maybe because they are still trying to sell off the old 2024 stock of the Road Glide Limited. Or maybe they have some marketing ‘benefit’ they are expecting by confusing their touring bike audience.

Regardless, the change is in fact visible directly on the Harley Davidson website. Americans will see the “Build Your Own” option on the 2025 Road Glide page. Within this user interface you can find the ‘Road Glide Limited’ option package to conveniently add all of the full dress touring features to a bike. This became active sometime in late January 2025, a few weeks after Harley announced the 2025 models.

For Canadians this change is visible if you go to the website and choose “USA” as your location. Choosing USA ‘enables’ the Road Glide ‘Build Your Own’ option in the Web UI. You can alternately follow this link to get to the US only bike builder without the noted gymnastics.

Of course, all the prices are in U.S. funds, but the main thing to get a look at here is the set of options available for the Road Glide. The same options are available via Canadian Harley Davidson dealers- for whatever reason Harley just isn’t ready to enable the ‘Build your Own’ website interface for Canadians yet. I should also note that these options can also be applied to the ‘new model’ 2024 117 ci Road Glide as the 2025 and 2024 versions of this bike are essentially identical.

What about a full dress trike?

I have decided that I want my new motorcycle to be a trike. Before you shake your fist at me: yes, I am aware that a trike (three wheel) is not a bike (two wheel), that’s why I am trying specifically to use ‘motorcycle’ here instead of ‘motorbike’. We can also defer any discussion of whether a person on a trike is a ‘motorcyclist’ or not.

From my personal perspective: I am experiencing some joint and back problems that suggest riding on two wheels may be a bit more of a challenge than I want in the next few years. I can still ride on two wheels quite effectively today, but in five or ten years… maybe not so much. I like the multi-day long-distance touring experience very much, and want to continue with it for as many years to come as possible.

So how about that new Road Glide 3 trike? Once again, Harley has done some strange (to me) things with their three wheeled version of the Road Glide. I am happy they introduced a trike with a frame attached fairing via the Road Glide 3, but for some reason they based this model on the stripped down ‘Freewheeler’ design instead of the ‘Tri-Glide Ultra’ full-dress configuration.

The Freewheeler design means that the Road Glide 3 comes without a tour pack, leaving it with about 2 cubic feet of storage versus the nearly 6 cubic feed of storage my current two wheeled Road Glide has. Worse yet: because of the upward-opening design of the Road Glide 3’s trunk it is impossible to add a tour pack to it at all. And to add insult to injury: the Road Glide 3 is using the older 114 cubic inch Milwaukee 8 engine and the older fairing.

I’m not really sure why Harley Davidson has gone this way with the Road Glide 3. They may have market data that shows that most of the people who buy these trikes don’t go on long-distance rides: for those folks, more of a ‘pub crawler’ configuration with limited storage may be the right choice. But it does seem quite odd to me to not issue a full-dress touring configuration given what I know about Road Glide riders.

You can’t always get what you want…

I have been following all of these pieces of information for a couple of years now as I prepared to commit to my ‘next’ motorcycle. It has been rather frustrating, but at least now I sort of have a path through the seeming madness.

I now know I can get a full dress configuration of the new Road Glide from Harley in 2025. That gives all the parts necessary to have a bike that is ready for a third party conversion to a full-dress three wheeled configuration. The outcome will in some ways be better than any available trike from Harley Davidson itself. The third party conversion kits from some vendors have superior rear suspension and other features like weight bearing full length floor boards.

Of course this also means increased cost and more time to wait, more complexity to wade through, more possible things to not quite work the way I hope or expect. But it gives me a way to achieve the outcome I want if I am willing to accept some challenges.

This is the path I have chosen. I have ordered my new 2025 Road Glide with ‘Limited’ configuration options (tour pack, lowers, etc.) and am hoping to have that sometime in April. If all goes well I will have that converted to a trike before the end of the year. I will write more about both of these processes as my upgrade journey progresses.