How VariantWise works

Every car is laid out as a ladder: its trims from the cheapest to the dearest, the price of each step and the features that arrive on it, read from the maker's own price list and specification sheet.

For each paid step we work out how much it adds for every rupee it asks, weighing each feature by how much it matters to a buyer. The step that adds the most for its money is the best value for money. The step that asks the most for the least is said out loud as a caution. A few more things are said once, where true: the trim with the most features, the cheapest way to every safety feature, the least you pay for an automatic. Where two variants earn the same claim, both wear it. No car gets one overall score, because that number would be ours and no source ever published it.

The list price is the maker's own ex-showroom figure for its Delhi price list, close to uniform across India after GST, the tax that sits inside the price you see. Nobody pays that figure. Road tax is the biggest addition and follows the state's own rule: a share of the price, by slabs of price or engine size, with the state's surcharges and ceilings, and its concession for an electric car while that lasts.

The rest is the same everywhere: the registration fee, three years of third-party insurance, the tax collected at source on a car above the threshold, and the toll tag. An estimate is marked as one, and own-damage insurance is left out and said to be left out, because an insurer prices it, not a rule. A state whose rule we cannot verify is not priced, rather than priced from a guess.

Alongside prices and features, the site says what independent testers and owners report about each car: crash results, reliability, running costs, service, resale. Today that rests on 1,124 cited pieces from 87 publications and bodies, across 187 cars. A maker's marketing is never a source.

Every score carries its citations, and how sure we are is computed from them, by publication rather than by link. A claim resting on one publication is labelled "single source". For real-world mileage, two independent publishers agreeing is indicative and three is established, and what we print is the range they measured, never a single decimal nobody could repeat. Because of this we sometimes have to say "we don't know", and we think that beats guessing.

If you represent a manufacturer and believe a specific claim is wrong, write to hello@variantwise.com naming the claim and the evidence. Where the evidence supports a correction we publish it, dated; where sources genuinely conflict we say so on the page. A claim traces to a source, or it comes down.

Step one, the hard filters: fuel, gearbox and budget rule variants out before anything is scored, and every price filtered on is ex-showroom.

Step two, the score. Each thing we look at is rated out of 10 on its own: the must-haves you asked for, rated together; using your budget well; equipment for the money; sheer size; the right engine, once you say how you drive; and what independent reviews say, where you asked. Each has a weight, and for your search the weights become shares of 100. The score is the sum of share times rating, out of 100, and every pick shows it. Must-haves carry the biggest weight, 18 each. Some features earn partial credit: ask for a 360-degree camera and a rear camera rates something, just much less, so a near miss still beats a complete miss.

Step three, engine fit for how you drive. High annual running favours diesel, because its lower fuel cost per kilometre recovers the higher price; low running counts against it, and the card says so. Mostly highway favours the stronger engines; mostly city the smoother, cheaper ones, with a small bonus for an automatic in traffic.

Step four, using your budget well. A variant that puts most of your budget to work rates a full 10; one well under it rates lower, so a car a class below what your money buys has to win on merit, and a saving inside the top of your budget is never punished. If a must-have cannot be had within your budget, a heads-up says so and shows the cheapest variant that has it. A higher trim within about 10 percent above your budget that genuinely outranks your best match is shown as a stretch, with exactly what the extra money buys. An option, not a push.

The formula in full, with every weight, the engine table, how sure each pick is and a playground to move the weights on a real search, is on how we rank.

Every variant is compiled by hand from public sources, led by the maker's own price and specification pages. Where a maker is silent or contradicts itself we read the independent motoring press, and the maker wins any disagreement about a price or a specification. Prices move without notice, so verify with a dealer before you sign.

The whole dataset lives at variantwise.com/data, with mirrors on GitHub, Kaggle and Hugging Face. VariantWise is independent: no maker or dealer pays us, there are no advertisements, no one pays to rank higher, and the photographs belong to their makers, used from official media as published.

• What the top of the range really costs → How far the dearest variant sits above the price in the advertisement, car by car.
• The same car, state by state → One variant priced on the road in every state we hold, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest.
• Where the safety features start → How far up each ladder a buyer has to climb for every safety feature the car offers.
• What an automatic gearbox adds → The extra cost of the automatic over the manual of the same trim, across the catalogue.
• What a sunroof costs you → The step up the ladder that brings a sunroof, and what else arrives with it.