This paper analyses non-human or posthuman ontologies in Saudi Arabian novels as an expression of the petromodern subject, through an in-depth examination of cars and roads. Across the writings of ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif (al-Nihāyāt (1977; Endings, 1988) and Mudun al-milḥ (1984–89; Cities of Salt)) [1], Rajaʾ ʿAlim (Ṭawq al-ḥamām (2010; The Dove’s Necklace, 2016)) and ʿAwad Shahir al-ʿUsaymi (al-Muharrib (2022, The Smuggler)), my analyses shift from the “technological encounter” that occurred during the initial phase of extractive industry to the twenty-first century, when automobility had become entrenched as a mode of circulation. Taking Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment as a point of departure, this paper traces in Munif how communities invoke the supernatural to interpret technology that seemingly defies the natural order. It argues, building on the scholarship of Karim Mattar and On Barak, that spectral readings of machines manifest the tangled skein of temporalities that constitutes so-called petromodernity. In the later novels, drawing on Pascal Menoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh (2014), Paul Virilio’s concept of “dromology,” a theory of speed as the constituent of reality, and Anna Tsing’s writings on the “damaged planet,” this paper then analyses how earlier tropes are appropriated and inverted to critique extant power structures embodied by the car as a central technology of the state apparatus. Through vehicles, a performative violence of speed, one that relies on theatre and spectacle, is enacted, while phantoms are replaced by cyborgs, biomechanical hybrids that project new subjectivities. This paper argues that Saudi novelists grapple with the inherent instability and precarity of a society built on oil wealth by evoking modes of being that reach beyond the contemporary and reflect the complex ontological and epistemological entanglements of oil itself. [1] Munif is often classified as a Jordanian-Saudi or transnational writer. His father was Saudi, but he spent most of his childhood in Baghdad. He was deprived of his Saudi citizenship because of his political activities. I include him here because Mudun al-milḥ is a roman à clef of the kingdom.