I honestly have no idea as to what mine is running as it's something I've never looked at, But on the highway in winter, I'll be lucky to get mine off the C (Heater barely works)
And in summer it sits beneath O 90% of the time.

My ef2 xr6(factory manual) temperature guage sits between the "A" and the "L" of temperature guage with a genuine ford 82 degree thermostat fitted.Guage does not rise even when under load or when weather gets really hot(it was @40 degrees here in Melbourne yesterday and guage still did not rise).I bought the car new and it still has the factory fitted radiator,water pump and head gasket at 156000km.It has however had the thermostat replaced 3 times by me as the original thermostat got stuck open at @95000km and the thermostat i replaced it with also got stuck open at @130000km.The original factory fitted thermostat was a 91 degree unit,and from new the temperature guage would always sit between the "M" and the "A" of the word normal.I flush the radiator and do coolant changes myself(car has never been to a radiator shop),and I only use the genuine Ford R1-3C corrosion inhibitor,same as what was used from the factory,which is still available from ford dealers.My last 500 ml bottle cost me $12.95 as I managed to get trade price from the dealer.The 82 degree thermostat was given to me by mistake by the female ford parts interpreter as i specifically asked for the 91 degree unit(I did not check it straight away as i was too busy checking her out!) but it seems to be working well without affecting fuel consumption.

Mine normally sits just under "L"...

Furthest it's gotten is at the M on a hot day in traffic.

Sorry about the thread mine but found something regarding my temp issues in my EL Fairmont and what I did to go through the motions of possibly fixing it. Might be useful for someone in the future.

So I have been doing a lot of highway driving to and from work for a whole year, around 500km a week all highway and ~50km metro. I used to get pretty decent fuel consumption on the highway, somewhere between 7-8L/100km, but in the last year I have noticed I am getting 10-11L/100km. I did notice that the needle on the temp gauge was sitting lower than what I remember, so I replaced the thermostat with a new 92C one (old one was gone). Needle didn't change much but I thought it was due to winter weather and ignored it. Fast forward to Monday with the 38C weather, and the needle still sat at around the same area. Put dash into diagnostics mode for the drive home and the car was sitting at 85C most of the time, although this is at highway speed. Get to 5 mins of metro driving, highest it got to was 89C for a moment before suddenly dropping to 85 again. I assume the thermostat opened causing the drop. Next day, max ambient temp 18C and car was between 83-85C in all driving conditions. Today I had time at work so pulled the thermostat out and tested it just in case it was busted, however it was opening at 92C which eliminates that.

Considering the the thermostat is working fine at 92C, my next guess is temp sensor. So I am going to replace the temp sensor and see how things go from there.

I do have a questions for those in the know though. I was going through diagnostics mode on the dash and noticed the voltage reading was 13.5V. A few weeks ago I checked the charging rate on the batter at 14.4V using a voltmeter. So I was wondering if a bad earth can cause the low voltage reading on the dash, if so, would a bad earth also cause a low temp reading overall?

Probably easiest thing you can do is check for a significant voltage drop between the -ve battery post, and decent spots on the engine and body. Do this of course whilst the engine is running.
Your temp sensor may just have a bit of scale buildup.

I checked the voltage drop and there was a max drop of 0.2V between -ve battery post and other earth points (engine, chassis, random bolts etc). Not sure if that is considered significant, but it is still higher than what the gauge/dash says. Should I be concerned about 0.2V drop?

I pulled the temp sensor out and gave it a clean with a wire brush and a bit of sand paper to remove the build up. Unfortunately it did not change the temp reading, I believe the internal thermal couple may have died so I will just replace it and go from there.

Thank you snap