Eight years after they went out of production and were thrown into history’s dustbin, Iran’s onetime national car, the Paykan, is making a comeback. Not that many people are especially interested in driving it again, with its manual steering and gearshift, rough ride and omnipresent gasoline vapors. But its surge in popularity — it is the subject of a documentary and two art exhibitions — seems to represent a longing for a simpler past.

“Every Iranian has memories of this car,” said Shahin Armin, 37, an Iranian-American design engineer who used to work for Chrysler and Honda in Detroit. “Maybe not always good ones, but we are romantic people. When people see a Paykan nowadays, they are reminded of a time when we had fewer choices and simpler lives.”

Mr. Armin, who moderates a Web site dedicated to the car, Paykanhunter.com, returned to his native Iran last year and quickly found himself caught up in what he calls the “Paykan revival.”

“I guess now that times are difficult again, the car reminds us of our own survival as a people.”

He stood in the Dastan Gallery in North Tehran where Iranian expatriates visiting from the United States and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, had gathered around a burned-out Paykan on display in the middle of the sleek gallery. Sipping espressos, they peeked through the opened-up keyhole of its back trunk, which showed a childhood picture of a boy sitting in the open trunk of a Paykan.

“This is amazing,” one of the visitors said of the car. “It doesn’t get more Iranian than this. This is history on wheels.”