A gold-plated Samand LX sedan dazzles onlookers in the Iranian capital after an accident forces its owners to drive the car around Tehran.

The owners of a 1-million dollar Samand had no choice but to drive the vehicle through the streets of Tehran when the truck carrying the car to a Caspian Sea port collided with a pick-up.

"Plans to deliver the unique gold-plated Samand LX to a Russian buyer in complete secrecy were scraped when people started exchanging images of the car on their mobile phones," Tabnak reported on Wednesday.

Apparently, the stunning vehicle suffered no damage in the accident, as it was securely packed in protective foam.

Gold-plated Porsches and diamond-studded Mercedes' are not something new, but a gold-plated Iranian automobile is certainly a new entry in the automotive world.

Interestingly, the gold-plated sedan was not produced by the automaker, Iran Khodro, but by two goldsmiths from Isfahan who decided to buy the car from the manufacturer and create a 1 million-dollar vehicle.

According to one of the two goldsmiths, they originally got the idea when they saw images of a gold-plated Porsche on TV and on the Internet.

"A few months ago, we thought to ourselves we have cars and we have gold, so why not make a gold car for ourselves," Farzad Fakhreddin told Tabnak.

Fakhreddin said that they modified the car with the help of a French engineer who worked for the Peugeot factory. They only gold-plated the tailgate, hood, doors and fenders as they did not want to undermine safety issues.

He added that they had also enhanced the engine, replaced the car mats with Persian carpets and asked an Iranian artist to decorate parts of the dashboard with khatam inlay.

Fakhreddin explained that they had chosen to work on a Samand LX because it was an Iranian-made vehicle.

According to the goldsmith, their Russian buyer plans to keep the car in his private collection.

MJ/JG