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Prototype Issue

Lovecraft Biofuels’ Steel Soul Conversions

By April Caires

(page 1 of 2)

More and more people are jumping on the biofuel bandwagon, a trend that's actually good for the earth. I can't be mad at this latest hipster attractor.

The story of Lovecraft Biofuels begins with a mystery: its name.

“I don’t talk about the name,” says Brian Friedman, creator of the business with the warm and fuzzy yet enigmatic title. “I prefer to let people make of it what they want.”

The air of mystery seems appropriate for an enterprise that, each day, performs a kind of mini miracle, an act of automotive redemption whereby eco sinners are converted to eco saints and filthy engines are made clean.

In the automotive world, diesel engines have long been viewed as the vilest offenders—loud, smelly, heavily polluting—but Lovecraft is working to change that. At their dusty garage on Sunset Blvd., more than 1,000 formerly smog spewing diesel vehicles have been reborn as Lovecrafts, their grease-stained souls washed in a cleansing flood of vegetable oil, their sins against the environment reduced, if not reversed.

The idea for Lovecraft came to Freidman five years ago. Back then, Al Gore was tinkering away at his would be Oscar-winning PowerPoint presentation; the Iraq War architects were spooking the press and the public into a coma of compliance; and Friedman was dreaming of something big: a road trip.

“I just wanted to get some free time to travel,” he says. “That’s where this all came out of.”

Friedman had just sold his former business, a tattoo and piercing parlor in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. He says he wanted to take a break and drive cross-country. But he didn’t want to line the oil industry’s pockets while he did it.

“Everything about petroleum was ugly,” he says. “I didn’t want to be supporting it, I didn’t want to be using it, I didn’t want to be connected to it in any way.”

Friedman started researching biofuel and tinkering in his garage. Those who convert their diesel engine cars to vegetable oil will see a difference in performance. The engines run cleaner and quieter and, once the old diesel sludge is flushed out—a process that takes about 10 tanks of vegetable oil—horsepower can increase too.

His initial intent was to convert his own car, not go into business. It didn’t work out that way. In just five years, Lovecraft went from a one-man operation to LA’s biggest name in diesel engine conversions.

“I have a natural instinct to get into business,” he says, “I just started doing it and had people immediately wanting cars.”

Still living in San Francisco at the time, he sold a few cars on Craigslist and began taking car orders from friends in Seattle.

Soon Friedman made his way to LA, where he opened the first Lovecraft shop. Here, he says, demand “blew up bigger than San Francisco and Seattle combined. It was huge overnight.”

Overnight is hardly an exaggeration. The business has performed 800 of its 1000 conversions in the last year and a half alone. That kind of exponential growth can be overwhelming, says Judi Krant, Lovecraft’s spokesperson and self-proclaimed biofuel evangelist.

“You’re going to drive your car just like you drove it before, but it’s going to run on vegetable oil.”

“It’s great,” she says of Lovecraft’s success, “and also a bit scary because the company was never formed around any true business plan.”

Krant, who calls Friedman the “mad scientist” and creative force behind Lovecraft, says the company’s rapid expansion led to massive upheavals. There were ownership hand-offs (Friedman, despite his role as creator and innovator, has never actually owned Lovecraft); a new branch in Portland; and an overall streamlining of the business, which recently stopped selling converted vehicles in order to focus solely on installing and selling conversion kits.

Adding to the turbulence was the public’s learning curve about biofuel. Some customers fumble to grasp the new technology; like the guy who kept filling his fuel tank with water.

Then there are the idealists, those who Friedman says think “they’re going to drive off into the sunset and rainbows are going to come down across the sky and unicorns are going to fly” because their car now runs on Mazola instead of diesel.

“Their euphoric bubble bursts” says Friedman, and he has to be the one to break the news: “You’re going to drive your car just like you drove it before, but it’s going to run on vegetable oil.”

Of course, the difference everyone wants to know about is price. A Lovecraft conversion runs $700 fully-installed, $450 for a do-it-yourself kit, but these costs can be offset by long-term fuel savings. Though prices fluctuate, Friedman says vegetable oil—whether it’s new oil purchased at Costco or waste oil discarded by restaurants—is always cheaper than diesel fuel.

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