In 1928, Walter P. Chrysler introduced the Plymouth, which raced up the sales charts to become the third-best selling car in the United States.

It’s a remarkable achievement, and one that is often overlooked: In the summer of 1928 at Madison Square Garden in New York, Walter P. Chrysler launched the Plymouth, his entry into the low-priced class, an upstart competing head-to-head against the industry’s biggest brands, Ford and Chevrolet. The low-priced field was the Motor City’s cutthroat zone, where profits were shaved to the final penny. Chrysler’s car company was barely four years old, and as the story goes, his friend Henry Ford warned him to stay out of the category, telling him, “Walter, you’ll go broke.”

Meanwhile, Chrysler already had plenty of work on his desk that summer, launching the DeSoto brand and acquiring the Dodge Brothers Co. in a massive stock swap valued at $170 million. A little more than a year in the future was the Wall Street crash, followed by the USA’s plunge into its deepest economic depression in history. But despite all these obstacles, Plymouth pulled off the seemingly impossible. The new brand raced up through the sales charts, shoving Essex, Willys-Overland, and Buick out of the way, and by 1932, Plymouth was the third best-selling car in the USA, trailing only Ford and Chevrolet. And the Chrysler Corporation had become the final member of the Big Three.

Mechanically based on Chrysler’s Model 52 four-cylinder series, the first Plymouth was designated the Model Q and listed at $675-$735. The pricing was a little higher than Ford or Chevrolet, but Chrysler made sure buyers got a little more, offering a longer wheelbase and advanced features like full-pressure engine lubrication and four-wheel hydraulic brakes. The four-cylinder Silver Dome engine, inherited from the Chrysler 52 and descended from Maxwell, displaced 170 cubic inches and produced 45 horsepower. In February of 1929, the Model Q was replaced by the improved Model U, which shared its chassis with DeSoto. However, both the Models Q and U were designated 1929 models by the company.

Originally marketed as the Chrysler Plymouth, the low-priced car was sold through Chrysler franchises, forming the Chrysler-Plymouth dealer alignment that continued for decades. Plymouth owned the number-three spot in sales all through the ’30s, the ’40s, and much of the ’50s, then regained it briefly in the ’70s. But by then, the U.S. new car market was shattering into multiple segments and the low-priced three no longer ruled the top of the sales charts. Plymouth struggled through the ’80s and ’90s with products that were essentially identical to their Dodge counterparts, and on November 3, 1999, the Chrysler Corporation announced the end of the Plymouth brand. But automotive historians still remember when Walter P. Chrysler pulled off a miracle.