Your mileage variation sounds similar to my experience. Having had three of the 96 motors one thing I notice is the more I "enjoy" myself the lower the mileage. On my 08 FLHTCU my average is usually around 40. If I smoke down the highway I can get down to 35 or so. If I ride on the back roads with other bikes and I short shift I may get up close to 45. BTW, when you first fill up your R value seems to be based on the previous mileage since reset. As you ride that value will adjust itself up or down. I would be curious to know what kind of mileage you get in steady high speed highway running. That is one place I would like to improve my mileage and would pay to mod the bike with a tuner and or high flow aircleaner if it improved high speed mileage.

 

I could fill my tank to overflowing and the gauge won't go all the way to the Full peg. One of these days I'm thinking of getting in there and bending the sending unit armature.

 

2010 Ultra and I have the same exact issue, the guage is showing complete empty at about 70 miles to go on the r value and the light comes on about 40 to go like yours. I average 38 MPG on mine (pure stock)
I hate the guage being so far off, but I love the r value on the odometer. It's almost like you have to set it to show the r value and always look at that and the guage is a waste of space/useless.

 

Just wondering, do all Ultra's have the r value on the odometer or just the limiteds?

 

LOL! Only an Ultra owner would care about the square root of the variance for the MPG.
So far ... but used an estimator with a mean squared error method instead.

 

Brought it home yesterday. All stock except the cat is gone and I put a SE Ventilator A/C on it.

Put on 238km (148 miles)
Put in 18.4L (4.9 gallons)
Idiot light came on at r=46 km (29 miles)
30.2m/gal

Immediately after leaving the dealership, I went and did some parking lot practice. Then I took it home 160km (100 miles) at 100-120kph (62-75mph). Salesman told me to vary the rpm lots for breakin so I was up and down through the gears and on and off the throttle a lot. Never got much above 4000 rpm though.
Temp was around 5C (41F). I sure do like those heated grips!

 

you'll be surprised when you get up to 4,000 miles on it or so. i know that when my bike hit 4 thousand or 4500 miles, it suddenly felt more powerful, smoother, and my fuel economy got much better. i guess that's where my motor seemed to finally be done breaking in, is about all i can figure. the motor started running noticeably cooler too. i'm assuming your bike is new as it's the flhtk, so if you've got very low miles on it, you'll see an improvement in several areas as all the parts wear in to each other.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I just picked it up from the dealer yesterday. I was hoping performance would improve with breakin.

 

2010 Limited, my first three fillups were 36, 37 and 38 MPG. Ultras I've had in the past were pretty much the same. Dealer didn't have the stage 1 air kit or the slipons I wanted or they would be on, but on my previous Ultras the mileage went up 3-4 MPG when I got those on. And the 4000 mile figure is about right, too.

 

my last fill up was just short of 45. i have a catless head pipe,modded cvo mufflers,andrews 54h,harley stage one,kn and a race tuner/tune.
my milage went up with the above mods and so did the torque.
one thing i lost alot of.......
heat!!!