Fresh from delivering three gold-plated SUVs to be used in Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, the Latvian-based Dartz Motorz made headlines this week with the world’s first ever leather-coated Ferrari F430.
The company was commissioned by an anonymous customer who was described only as “very rich” by Dartz founder Leonard Yankelovich.
When talking to reporters, Yankelovich was mum on the details of how he applied the leather to the body of the car, other than to say it took 16 working days and a lot of “Dartz know-how.”
There’s no word yet on how the new skin would react to a sudden thunderstorm, but Yankelovich did let one other important detail slip about the composition of the leather—describing it as something “in between” vinyl and leather; he insisted the leather was nonetheless genuine.
Dartz specializes in retrofitting vehicles to be bulletproof and bombproof, but adding quirky accents of luxury has also shown itself to be a lucrative market for company. In addition to the bulletproof, gold-plated SUV’s used in The Dictator, Dartz Motorz has used materials as exotic as the foreskin from a whale in its designs. In 2009, animal rights activists, including Pamela Anderson, pressured the company to back away from using any materials derived from whales in future customizations.
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