Ford MTX-I / MTX-II / MTX-III / MTX-IV

Ford's front-drive manual transaxle family of the 1980s — Manual TransaXle, numbered in Roman numerals, and four different gearboxes rather than four revisions of one.

• MTX-I — a four-speed, 1981 to 1984, the base gearbox of the Escort and the Mercury Lynx.
• MTX-II — a four-speed, 1985 to 1990, for the Tempo and the Topaz.
• MTX-III — the five-speed, 1983 to 1994, optional across every Escort, Lynx, Tempo and Topaz from 1984, and the gearbox of the four-cylinder Taurus and the Taurus MT-5.
• MTX-IV — a five-speed built by Mazda rather than by Ford, introduced in 1989 for the Taurus SHO and the V6 Tempo and Topaz.

That last one is the distinction that matters on a Taurus. The MT-5 and the four-cylinder cars have the MTX-III; the SHO has the MTX-IV, which is a different gearbox from a different manufacturer, specified because the Yamaha-built V6 in front of it made far more of everything than an MTX-III was built for. A parts search that treats "Taurus 5-speed" as one item will return the wrong gearbox roughly half the time.

None of these is the MTX-75. That is a later and unrelated Ford design of the mid-1990s — the Contour, the Mystique, the Cougar and, much later, the Focus and the Jaguar X-Type — and it has its own page here. The shared three letters are the trap: a car built before 1995 has one of the numbered units above, and a car built after has the MTX-75.