SAO PAULO, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Newly rich residents of Sao Paulo increasingly armor their cars, making more than 3,000 of them bulletproof in a year, an industry armoring trade group says.

In the past three years, the number of armored cars in Brazil has doubled as sudden wealth has made the newly rich targets in a class-driven society where the murder rate is nearly five times that of the United States, The Wall Street Journal reports.

These cars are taken apart and then put back together with steel door plates, windows five layers thick and tires that keep rolling even after taking a bullet, the newspaper says.

The cost is about $25,000, often doubling a vehicle's price, and the process adds 400 pounds or so of weight, cutting a car's useful life in half.

Auto dealers advise customers to replace their armored vehicles every 30,000 miles.

The market is still small, with less than 1 percent of cars, or some 86,000 vehicles, sold in Brazil getting armored so far, says the Brazilian Association of Armoring, a Sao Paulo-based trade group.

But sales keep rising at more than 6,000 vehicles a year as Brazil's economy grows, bringing more people into riches.

Others do it for status, the newspaper says.

"I wouldn't drive it unless it was armored," Kareen Passos, 19, tells the Journal. She drives an armored pink Volkswagen New Beetle.