I am standing in a quiet, shady car park on the northern edge of Los Angeles and a Citroën BX on UK numberplates is floating through a car park before me.
This is the aptly named Cars and Coffee Los Angeles, a fairly low-key event that takes place in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains that tower above Downtown LA.
From 7am until 10am on the last Sunday of every month, a sleepy car park on the site of the original Los Angeles Zoo is transformed into a petrolhead’s paradise.
At least, that’s what I’ve been told. But it’s currently 6.55am and my Uber driver has dropped me off in a large, depressingly empty car park. I sit for a minute or so, working out my next move.
Then I hear the unmistakable sound of a straight six gently echoing up the valley, high-pitched notes caught on the cool breeze.
Moments later, a shark-nose BMW 635 CSI glides into view, its Paul Bracq-designed silhouette recognisable from 100 metres away. It cruises past, heading down a side road I hadn’t noticed before.
Naturally, I follow and am soon passed by an impossibly long Mercedes W112 Cabriolet and a similarly aged Chevrolet pick-up truck that appears to be the size of a small house.
What they lead me to is the motoring equivalent of El Dorado. The clock’s only just gone seven but this car park, hidden in the trees, is filling up fast.
In the middle are a group of off-roaders, comprising a few classic Ford Broncos and a couple of clearly European-spec Land Rover Defenders, one still featuring its original Spanish numberplate on the front.
They sit side by side with an incredibly clean 964-gen Porsche 911, a black Ferrari Mondial and a roofless Ford Model A hot rod, all looking resplendent in the morning sun. There’s something about the slight smoggy haze in LA that makes cars look even better than they do normally.
Rejuvenated by coffee truck supplies, I ponder the origins of this type of event. People have been getting together to show each other their rides since the second car was built, but car culture was cultivated in California a bit more than it was in most other places – partly down to the warm climate, partly because of the fabulous roads.
A modern Cars and Coffee event is characterised by a lack of formality. There’s no invited guest list and no big promotion beforehand: you simply tell a few people who you think might be interested and people show up on a Sunday morning.
Some say that this modern format was popularised in the early 2000s by Barry Meguiar (you’ve almost certainly heard of his car cleaning products), who started a laid-back event at a place called Crystal Cove, just south of LA.
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