TEHRAN — It was 5 o’clock on a recent morning as the canary yellow Porsche raced up the treelined Shariati boulevard in Tehran. The young woman at the wheel, it later emerged, came from the poorer south side of the city. The young man next to her, the nouveau riche grandson of an ayatollah, had bought the car just two days earlier.

Streetlights flashed past like flickering strobe lights as the Boxster GTS accelerated to 120 miles an hour, the high-pitched roar of its six cylinders reverberating in the empty morning streets.

To that point, the scene could have passed for normal in North Tehran, where increasing numbers of the children of the well-connected live their lives as if the country’s restrictive Islamic laws were written for someone else. Their luxury cars have become symbols of a growing inequality in Iran, where a new class of untouchable 1 percenters hoards money, profiting from sanctions and influential relations, leaving Iran’s middle classes to face the full force of the country’s deepening economic woes.

Instead of ending the night parking behind the closing gates of an uptown villa, however, the first-time Porsche driver, Parivash Akbarzadeh, 20, lost control of the car, slamming into the curb and hitting a tree. She was killed instantly, and the car’s owner, Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi, 21, died hours later of his injuries, the Afkarnews reported on April 23.