About Sawaari
A two-wheeler finder for Indian roads, and how it makes up its mind.
What this site does
Most bike sites answer the question tell me about this model. Almost nobody walks into a showroom with that question. People arrive with something much more specific: ₹1.2 lakh on the road, 22 km each way, wife on the back on Sundays, and a lane that floods every July. Sawaari is built for that second question.
You answer a short run of questions — budget on the road, petrol or electric, the state of the roads you actually ride, daily distance, pillion duty, how far the nearest service centre is, whether you want gears — in any order, skipping anything you are unsure about. After every answer, the entire catalogue re-ranks in front of you. At the end you get one recommendation with its reasoning attached: why it won, what you give up by taking it, and the closest rival worth test-riding against it. It takes about three minutes.
How the scoring works
Each answer carries a dial: nice to have, important, or non-negotiable. Non-negotiables become hard filters — a machine that misses one is cut from the list, not merely marked down. Everything else becomes a weight in a trade-off. Every measurable attribute is normalised across the whole field first, so a machine with 40 PS and one with 55 litres of underseat storage can be compared on the same footing instead of on whichever number the brochure chose to shout about.
Two figures do more of the work here than anywhere else, and they are the two that Indian showroom conversations skip:
- Running cost per kilometre. Rated power sells a motorcycle; ₹/km is what you actually pay for it. A Splendor-class 110 commuter costs about ₹1.6 a kilometre, a 200-class sports bike about ₹2.6, a 650 twin about ₹4.2. That first gap alone is roughly ₹15,000 a year at 40 km a day — real money against an EMI, and enough to reverse a ranking that looked settled on the spec sheet. Electric scooters land near ₹0.2/km on home charging and the one CNG bike here around ₹1, which is exactly why the fuel question comes early rather than as a footnote.
- Real-world range per fill or charge. Not the certification figure. Range here is what owners report rather than what ARAI or IDC testing produces — for petrol that is honest mileage against the actual tank, and for an electric scooter it is the 90 to 170 km these machines really do, two-up, in July traffic, with a charge that then takes hours rather than the two minutes a petrol pump takes. A tool that quietly repeats brochure numbers is worth nothing on the day you are stranded, so the number that gets scored is the one you will live with.
Ground clearance, kerb weight, seat height, service reach, resale strength and braking are all scored alongside them. Speed breakers, potholes and waterlogging retire more scooters in India than engines do, and a brilliant machine 200 km from its nearest spare part is, for the person who owns it, a bad machine.
Independence
No manufacturer, dealer or portal pays for placement, and there is no mechanism by which they could. The ranking is a pure function of two things: the catalogue and your answers. The scoring engine cannot see the commerce links at all — outbound links live in a separate module that the ranking code does not import, so a change to what earns money cannot change what gets recommended even by accident.
Brand and colour are deliberately not questions. Both decide plenty of real purchases and neither can be ranked honestly. The promise here is a result you can defend to whoever is paying, not a result you already wanted.
What is in the catalogue
Sixty-four models across sixteen brands — Hero, Honda, TVS, Bajaj, Suzuki, Yamaha, Royal Enfield, KTM, Jawa, Yezdi, Vespa and the electric makers Ather, Ola, Hero Vida, River and Simple Energy. Petrol, electric and CNG; scooters and motorcycles; from ₹75,000 commuters up to 650 twins and Himalaya-capable adventure bikes. The site is available in English and Hindi.
Prices are indicative on-road figures in Indian rupees — ex-showroom plus RTO, insurance and handling. On-road pricing genuinely varies by state and by dealer, and offers move month to month, so treat every figure here as the number you start a conversation from, not the number you will be quoted. The same applies to specifications: confirm at the dealership, and test-ride before you sign anything.
How this is paid for
India has no two-wheeler checkout to link into — the sale closes at a dealership — so where Sawaari earns anything, it is from research links out to price-and-comparison portals. Some of those may be affiliate links, which pay a small commission at no extra cost to you. As of today no affiliate network is switched on and every outbound link goes straight to the portal. Whenever links like that appear, the disclosure appears with them. Either way, the money never reaches the ranking: see Independence above for why that is structural rather than a promise.
Who runs it
Sawaari (motos.downto1.com) is part of DownTo1, a small independent family of decision tools built on the same idea: ask better questions, rank the whole field, show the working. It is run by one person, not a media company, and it has no dealership, no showroom and nothing to sell you. The operator and data-controller details are on the privacy page.
Start here
- Answer the questions — the finder itself, about three minutes.
- Prepared answers — the common cases already worked out: the best two-wheeler for the daily commute, for family errands, for weekend rides, for touring, for delivery work; petrol or electric; for broken roads, monsoon waterlogging or highway stretches.