Opel 14NV / C16NZ / X16XE

Opel's small four — Family I — the 1.4, 1.6 and 1.8 in the Corsa, Astra, Kadett and Vectra.

It is the engine of an enormous number of ordinary European cars and it is simple: single overhead camshaft on most versions, port-injected or carburetted on the oldest, and belt-driven.

The code reads as a sentence — generation letter, displacement, then the feature letters. NZ means a catalyst with single-point injection; XE means sixteen valves with multi-point. That is more useful than any parts catalogue when a car turns up with no paperwork.

Its complaints are old-fashioned and cheap: a tired idle control valve, a distributor or DIS module that fails with heat, and inlet gaskets that harden and leak unmetered air.

The Z-generation Ecotec engines that followed — Z16XER and the rest — have their own page here, and they are a different design despite the shared displacement class.