Somebody had to keep score

The problem

A brochure figure comes from a test procedure, on a rig, under conditions no commute has ever resembled. It is not a lie exactly, it is an answer to a question nobody asked. The question riders actually ask is: what will this bike do for me, on these roads, in this traffic?

The honest answer lives in thousands of fuel bills, scattered across thousands of riders, and it has never been collected. So a buyer choosing between two bikes has two brochure numbers and a forum argument.

What we built

An app where logging a fill takes seconds: odometer, litres, done. Do it twice and you have a real reading, because full tank to full tank is the only measurement that does not need a sensor nobody’s bike has. Do it for a few months and you know your machine better than the brochure does.

Every one of those tanks also goes into a pooled, anonymous record of what each model actually delivers. That record is this website, it is free, and it works without an account. Your data never appears individually. What appears is what a model does across everyone riding one.

How we think about numbers

Credibility is the entire product. A mileage site that inflates, guesses or rounds in its own favour is worth precisely nothing, and riders would spot it within a week.

• We never invent data. No placeholder averages, no filler. If nothing has been logged, the page says nothing has been logged.
• Sample size is always on screen. A number without a count behind it is an opinion.
• Thin evidence is labelled thin. A figure from one rider says so, and cannot reach a leaderboard.
• A spread, not a bare average. Where there is enough data we show the range most riders land in, because that is the useful shape.
• We publish the questions we cannot answer yet, with a live count of how far off we are. See Findings.

Where it stands today

390 verified models in the record. 3 of them carry a real reading so far, from 26 clean tank-to-tank fills. That is a small number and it is on this page on purpose: the record is early, and pretending otherwise would be the first broken promise.

Whoever logs first on a bike writes its number. Right now that is most of them.

Who

RevRANGE is part of Rev Republic, a motorcycle riding club out of Bangalore. Weekend rides, moto camping, long hauls, and a week to Gokarna every Christmas. Free to join and approval gated, because it is a crew rather than a count.

The app came out of that community rather than being marketed at it, and that is the order we intend to keep: the rides come first, and the product gets built with the riders in it rather than ahead of them. If the numbers here are any good, it is because the people logging them ride together.

The business model, plainly

The app is free and there are no ads. We have not finished deciding how this pays for itself and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we have decided is what is off the table: we will not sell your personal data, and we will not let anyone pay to move a number. The moment a figure here can be bought, there is no reason for anyone to read it, including us.