It's like walking into Michelangelo's studio and finding him chipping lumps of marble from the David. Jimmy Shine takes off his welder's mask and puts down the torch and politely introduces himself by name. He is working on the bare-metal body of a chopped '34 Ford hot-rod for Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. If Shine is a sculptor, his patron Gibbons is like one of the Medici bankers who paid for the Renaissance. Other than learning to weld aged nine, Shine has had no formal training, but he can build by eye and instinct a car whose form, proportions, surfacing and stance are all just perfect. I defy you not to want a Jimmy Shine hot rod. I asked a few people why the great southern Californian hot rod builders get it so right, when the armies of trained designers at big car companies often get it so wrong, and got the same answer; a shrug of the shoulders, and, 'they just get it'. Jimmy Shine definitely gets it.

Last year I was in California to report a story called 'The New Detroit', about how Silicon-Valley money and dot-com brains meant the future of the US car industry might lie here with companies like Tesla, and not in Detroit. Since the war southern California has fizzed with car design and engineering ideas. The SoCal scene hasn't just created the vast, global hot-rod industry, or influenced car design, or spawned the companies that might forever change the way we drive. It also created drag racing and salt-flat speed tests, and it permeates American pop culture: fashion, music like the Beach Boys' '409' and 'Little Deuce Coupe', and films like George Lucas's American Graffiti…