MegaMotor 5F18

The five-speed manual in SAIPA's Shahin, localised and built by MegaMotor, SAIPA's powertrain arm — and the one Iranian gearbox in this catalogue that comes from neither the Peugeot BE family nor the Pride's Kia lineage.

Its origin is the most useful thing to know about it, and it is a trap. MegaMotor's own powertrain-development office describes the unit as an East Asian design with a Mitsubishi root — the original sits behind Mitsubishi's 4A9 four-cylinder engines — localised by reverse engineering, with many of its parts changed for local supply. The same office says outright that it therefore cannot be called the Mitsubishi gearbox. So do not work it from a Mitsubishi F5M4x parts list: the machine on the bench and the machine in that catalogue share an ancestor and not a bill of materials.

The shift is by cable, not by rods, and that is a deliberate departure from the BE3 and BE4 in Iran Khodro's cars, which select through a rod and selector shaft. It is why the lever on this car does not carry engine vibration. It also moves where a selection complaint lives. On a rod linkage the wear is in bushes and joints; here the questions are the cables — their routing, their adjustment and their end fittings — and a gearbox stripped for a stiff or vague shift may be a gearbox stripped for nothing.

The synchroniser rings are brass, and MegaMotor rates the unit's transmission efficiency above the BE series it is usually compared with.

For an owner: this is a different machine from the gearbox in a Samand or a Pride, not a newer version of either — and it is not simply a Mitsubishi box either. A workshop that treats it as any of the three is reading the wrong parts list.