the taunus was designed to take a 1.5-litre side-valve engine developed from the 1.2-litre unit used in the eifel. however, in march 1939 the government, anticipating war, introduced restrictions whereby ford were permitted to produce only a single standardised engine in the class of cars covered by engine sizes between 1.2 and 2.0 litres, and so the taunus used the smaller 1,172 cc engine (a k a known as english sidevalve) carried over from the eifel model. this was essentially the same unit that ford would fit in the ford taunus p1 (and, at their dagenham plant the ford anglia) until 1959.