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Ford Taunus was a production line of the Ford Motor Company that started out at the Ford production plant in Cologne, Germany in 1939 with a new american-designed body on a slightly stretched frame from the previous Ford Eifel, but many of the cars using this name has also been produced in other parts of the world, often in conjunction with local industry and adjusted to the needs and wants of the local market. For some periods and/or in specific markets such as the USA where the cars were sold through the Lincoln-Mercury dealership network, Taunus was used as the brand name for the cars, merely mentioning that the cars where produced by Ford. This was also the case in pre-war Germany where the political situation at the time called for emphasizing the fact that the car was mainly a domestic product as it was all built in the country. It may be noted that a minor assembly production was also done in Latvia by Ford´s local associate that year before shutting down business due to political changes in ownership laws.
Production in Cologne was also soon halted on all but a few cars being made for the police force and other official customers due to the outbreak of World War II and not to be restarted until 1947 when the Cologne plant could be re-opened after rebuilding, making the original Taunus design very shortlived with a facelift for the 1948 model with most notably a new wide and low grille opening with a large chrome-plated bar surrounding it and a thinner bar as a horizontal divider. This first generation where on some markets such as the Scandinavian countries presented as the Taunus 10M when it came time to introduce the first accessory package, later on the line was split into a choice of Standard and a De Luxe. The M was to be read as short for "Meisterstûck" ("Masterpiece" in german) as the moniker had rapidly been taken by another german car maker, but the letter stuck to the minds of people and when this series was replaced for 1952 with an all-new unibody design following the larger 1949 US Ford it was called the Taunus 12M with an internal suffix of P1 (Projekt 1, the first new german Ford car after the war). Later on in 1955 it was to be joined by the mechanically further developed and more dressed-up 15M using the same body. With the 15M came a new overhead-valve engine which was based on the british Ford Consul engine, but built metric and more efficient. As of the year 1957, the Taunus line was split in two with the dawn of the slightly bigger 17M model. The first one, series P2, only ran for three years (although just enough time for a second design of the roof panel and some other pieces) before being replaced until 1960 by Taunus 17M series P3, which was to the most part mechanically the same at first but under a whole new windswept body that kept little but a few steel profiles in the platform from its forerunner, gaining strength but losing weight in the process. The rear-wheel driven 12/15M series would keep up by popular demand until the 1962 model year when it was replaced by the totally new and highly inventive 12M series P4, which entered with two items brand new to Ford - a V-4 engine and frontwheel drive. This line was to be succeeded by the similar Taunus 12M/15M series P6, which was produced until the summer of 1970 when preparations started for the introduction of the Taunus 1 family (type TC 1, as part of the all-new Taunus-Cortina range of cars) in september that year.
The Taunus 17M P3 series kept up in production until december 1964 (possibly later in a few remote assembly plants around the world) when the new, bigger Taunus 17M/20M series P5 was in full production. The engines where based on the V4 design of the 12M cars, the body and front suspension drew heavily on the P3 series, but very few parts were actual carry-overs from the previous line. Improvements were made as production went along, but a major design change to the year 1968 changed the type code to P7. A poor welcome from the market forced an early facelift for the 1969 model year and the type code got a suffix, P7b or P7.2 depending on which written factory source is studied. Now was also the time for introduction of the enlarged 2,6 litre version of the Taunus V6 engine. In the years 1969-74 the Taunus name was dropped for marketing reasons from the bigger, rear-wheel drive line of cars, thus being marketed only as Ford 17M/20M/26M depending on the size of the engine.
The last car to use the Taunus name was the final branch of the european-built Taunus-Cortina (LHD-drive cars are all badged Taunus) which after ceasing production in Germany, the whole production line was shipped from Cologne to Ford´s turkish business partner KOC which restarted the production of the current model. The brand name then being Otosan-Ford Taunus (at this time there was actually two separate Taunus lines counting the argentinian line starting in 1974 which is a story of its own), and Otosan modernized the car in stages mainly with parts adapted from the Ford Sierra, the final version being the Taunus 2000 GLS was taken out of production in 1994. .