Dodge Omni
After the wild and carefree 1960s, the oil crisis and ecological regulations hit the North American auto market hard, leaving Detroit-based manufacturers in utter chaos. The previous decade was all about unleashing monster amounts of horsepower. However, the 1970s commanded a completely different approfor for the companies to survive. As the smallest of the Big Three, Chrysler probably had it the worst because it had the fewest resources for developing a car to tackle the new challenges on the market (via Old Car Memories).
In the emerging economy car segment, Ford had the Pinto, Chevrolet had the Vega, and Chrysler came up with Dodge Omni/Plymouth Horizon. It was a small front-wheel drive subcompact that turned out to be the best American answer to the flood of affordable, high-quality Japanese imports. The Omni sold hundreds of thousands of examples in its first years of production, helping Chrysler survive troublesome times. Chrysler sold almost a million examples from 1977 to 1990.