Also known as: m15i, m15tc, m16, me16, 4j20v, saipa m15, saipa m16, m15
Saipa's own petrol fours — the 1.5 M15 and 1.6 M16 — in the Quick, Shahin, Atlas and Aria.
They are among the commonest engines on Iranian roads and are essentially undocumented in English, which is the practical constraint on working on one: search the engine code rather than the model, and expect the useful material to be in Persian.
They descend from Saipa's licence-built Kia and Renault engines rather than from a clean sheet, which is worth knowing when parts are being sourced.
They are conventional port-injected fours — chain or belt by variant — and their complaints are the ordinary ones: a carboned throttle body giving a hunting idle, ignition coils, and a coolant temperature sensor that ruins economy quietly.
Fuel quality is the variable that decides an engine's life in the markets these are sold in, more than mileage does — carbon in the head and on the valves is a routine finding rather than a fault, and it responds to cleaning.
Cars fitted with this engine
7 generations, across 1 make. From the authored catalogue — an absent car means the catalogue has not reached it, not that the engine was never fitted.
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
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What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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