How we rank

Your fuel and gearbox choices are treated as non-negotiable. If you pick diesel, no petrol variant will ever appear in your picks, and the same goes for manual versus automatic.

Your budget is almost as strict. We allow a small grace margin of about 2 percent, because in practice nobody walks away from the right car over a difference of a few thousand rupees on a many-lakh purchase. Anything beyond that margin is out, no matter how good it is. Every price we filter on is ex-showroom, which means it excludes registration, insurance and road tax.

Everything that survives the filters gets a score, and the features you marked as must-haves are by far the biggest part of it. A variant that has what you asked for climbs the ranking; one that misses a must-have falls behind, and the card tells you plainly what is missing.

Some features earn partial credit. If you ask for a 360-degree camera and a variant only has a rear camera, it scores something, just much less than the real thing. That way a near miss still beats a complete miss.

Your driving pattern nudges the ranking towards the right engine and gearbox. High annual running favours diesel, because its lower fuel cost per km recovers the higher purchase price. Low annual running counts against diesel for the same reason, and we say so in a caution on the card. Mostly highway driving favours the stronger engines; mostly city driving favours the smoother, cheaper ones, with a small bonus for automatics in traffic.

A variant that puts most of your stated budget to work scores a little higher than one that leaves a lot on the table, but savings are never punished. If a cheaper variant covers everything you asked for, it can still win, and we tell you how much of your budget it leaves unspent.

We also give a small nudge to variants that pack more features per rupee. This is why the value trims often appear in your picks even when pricier options fit the budget.

You get up to three picks, at most one per trim, so the list is three genuinely different options rather than the same trim with three powertrains. Every pick comes with plain-language reasons and, where honest, cautions.

If a must-have simply cannot be had within your budget, a heads-up card says so before the picks, and shows the cheapest variant that does have it and how far it sits above your budget. We would rather tell you the uncomfortable number than quietly drop your must-have.

Finally, if a higher trim sits within roughly 10 percent above your budget and genuinely outranks your best match's trim, we show it as a stretch option with a list of exactly what the extra money buys. It is an option, not a push; the within-budget pick stays on top.

Alongside prices and specs, we publish what independent testers and owners report about each car: crash results, reliability patterns, service costs and resale. These scores are our reading of published, independent evidence. Manufacturer marketing is never a source, because a maker is not a neutral narrator about its own cars.

Every score carries its citations, and the confidence we show is computed from them: a claim resting on a single publication is labelled as such, however many pages that publication wrote. A defect is only described as a pattern when it appears across many owners or is confirmed by a recall, service bulletin or published investigation. One owner's bad week is an anecdote, and we word it as one.

We deliberately publish no single overall rating per car. A car can be excellent in a crash test and weak on resale, and averaging those into one number would produce a figure no source ever published. Each dimension stands on its own evidence.

If you represent a manufacturer and believe a specific claim is wrong, write to us identifying the claim and the evidence. Where the evidence supports a correction we will publish it, dated, and where sources genuinely conflict we will say so on the page. We hold ourselves to the same bar we hold the data to: claims trace to sources, or they come down.

Our variant data is compiled by hand from public sources, led by the manufacturer's own price and specification pages. Where a maker is silent or contradicts itself we check independent motoring publications, and the maker wins any disagreement. The current dataset was compiled in July 2026.

All prices are ex-showroom Delhi. Ex-showroom means before registration, insurance and road tax, so your on-road price will be higher and varies by state. Prices and feature lists change without notice, so always verify with a dealer before you buy.

VariantWise is independent. We are not affiliated with any car manufacturer, no one pays to rank higher, and vehicle images belong to their respective manufacturers, used from official media assets.

Spotted an error in our data? We want to know. It will only make the recommendations better.