The Shah of Iran, who ruled from 1941 until he was overthrown in a 1979 revolution, was an auto aficionado with a taste for European classics and exotics. During his authoritarian reign, he assembled a large collection -- how large is anybody's guess -- that included vehicles specially built for him. 'Unfortunately, we have not been able to gain access to records that can verify the actual number there were in the collection at any one time,' Ramin Salehkhou, president of the Classic Car Committee of the Motorcycle and Automobile Federation of Iran, said in an e-mail. 'After the country's 1979 revolution, the government expropriated the cars of the shah and his associates. Over the years, many of the cars were sold off in auctions and taken out of Iran.' Some 100 cars that belonged to the shah are now in the National Auto Museum, which occupies a warehouse on the outskirts of Tehran. Salehkhou and a group of volunteers maintain the cars and are restoring them at their own expense. The group has completed work on a 1965 Bizzarrini 5300 GT Strada, a Corvette-powered Italian sports car. Winston Goodfellow, a U.S. author and photographer who is also a Bizzarrini expert, helped to authenticate the car. The gem of the museum collection is a 1934 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn-Kurier, one of two in the world, Salehkhou said. Other notable cars include a 1958 Chrysler Ghia show car and a one-off Pierce-Arrow with gold-plated trim used by the shah's father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, for state occasions. The collection also includes a 1965 Ferrari 500 Superfast (one of 36 built), a bevy of Rolls-Royces from the 1920s to the 1970s -- and, according to Salehkhou, one of the largest collections of Mercedes 600 models in the world, including an ultrarare Landaulet model. He described a single-seat car built jointly by Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Volkswagen and styled like the Mercedes-Benz C111 prototype. 'This car was presented by the German government to the crown prince on his 12th birthday,' Salehkhou said, referring to a son of the shah. 