Motorsport Landskrona, my Voge dealer here in Sweden, have been working on their own engine map for the DS900X for a while. It is finished, and I was the first customer to have it fitted.
The demo bike sold it in about five minutes
They put me on their demo bike first, which already had the map on it. The difference was obvious straight away. I came back in and said I wanted it on mine, and they started working on it immediately.
The low-speed snatch
The DS900X has a well known low-speed throttle problem. On and off the throttle below walking pace is abrupt, which makes it hard to do what we call "krypköra" in Swedish: crawling along at very low speed, filtering through a car park, picking your way over rough ground. The bike would surge and then drop, so you end up riding the clutch to smooth out what the throttle should be doing.
That is completely gone. The bike now does slow speed properly for the first time since I bought it.
This site already has a page on the throttle snatching with the workarounds owners have been using: Road mode instead of Sport, the TPS reset sequence, and waiting for it to bed in. Those are all still worth knowing if a remap is not available to you.
Feels like more power
Throttle response is better across the whole range. The connection between your wrist and the engine feels direct in a way it did not before.
You can also tell quite clearly that it makes more power than before. The bike gets up to speed noticeably quicker than it did on the way there, and the same was true of the demo bike before mine had been touched. No dyno run was done either side, so there is no figure to quote yet.
Inside the map
They showed me their mapping table. They had both removed and added fuel depending on where you are in the range, with most of the work in the middle of the rev range rather than at the extremes.
That matches how the bike feels. The problem was never that the engine was short of fuel everywhere; it was that the calibration was wrong in specific places. The KEL895 is the same basic engine BMW uses in the F900 range, and BMW's version does not have this complaint, which has always suggested the hardware was fine and the map was the problem.
The warranty question
The advice on this site until now has been that a remap is the only permanent fix, that it costs a few hundred pounds from a third-party tuner, and that it will probably cost you part of your warranty.
A map developed and fitted by the authorised dealer changes that calculation, although less cleanly than I first assumed. People asked about it when I first posted this article, so I went back to Motorsport Landskrona for the detail.
Strictly speaking, the remap does void the factory warranty. What makes it workable in practice is that this dealer will handle warranty matters themselves, which they can do as an authorised Voge dealer. Voge Norden (Voge in the Nordics) run the same software in their own bikes, supplied by this dealer, so they have no reason to object to it.
This could of course become an issue if you need to take your bike elsewhere for a warranty repair. Another dealer who learns the software has been changed would be within their rights to refuse a factory warranty claim. Motorsport Landskrona say that has never happened to them, and they point to how often they do the same work on Indian motorcycles, where even Indian Europe sends bikes to them for updates.
If you stay with the dealer who did the work you are covered by them, and if you move dealer or move country you are relying on nobody objecting. Get the dealer's position in writing before you commit either way.
Pricing depends on the bike and what else is being done, so ask Motorsport Landskrona directly. If you do get in touch, feel free to mention you read about it here.
I took the long way home
I decided I did not want to take the quickest way home, so I went out for a longer ride where I really got to appreciate the added power of my DS900X. Overtaking, and even just cruising at a constant speed, is more effortless than before. Don't get me wrong - the bike as it comes is quick, but not as quick as this.
I will update this page once I have some more distance on it. If you have had a remap done, please tell me how it went.