[The Life of the Automobile] is undoubtedly one of Ehrenburg's best things. It is both a period piece, and yet amazingly fresh and relevant…. During the 1920s Ehrenburg brought out a number of very imaginative fictions…. The Life of the Automobile belongs to this group, and might be described as a semi-documentary fantasy on the origins, development, philosophy, social impact, and future of the car. Although the satirical and didactic thrust of the book is strong and perhaps over-strong—the car is seen as a focal area of ruthless capitalistic enterprise—there are also some of the expected Ehrenburgian ambiguities, both in his extension of the satire to include Soviet society in the New Economic Policy period of the 1920s, and in his infectious evoking of the new world of speed and adventure (to say nothing of convenience) that the car, however much we may want to deplore it, dangles and flashes before us. Industrial dehumanization, consumerist fetishism, even an image of the car as the shark of terra firma ("the car wanted to gulp something"; "Grinning, the car whizzed off"; "The cars waited for prey"): it is all here, and yet passages of attack are frequently double-edged, the early twentieth-century romance of the machine uncertainly held down by admonition or mockery….

Ehrenburg's interest in Constructivism as a movement in the arts … [was] a part of what he called the "genuine romanticism of the period", and it would be strange if this romanticism did not colour and complicate the social satire of The Life of the Automobile. Not only is the book Constructivist in general form, with all the articulations clearly showing …, but its characteristically Expressionist writing technique—short, hard, jagged sentences and phrases, with much quick cutting from scene to scene or juxtaposing of concrete and abstract—serves in its own way to produce a faceted, cinematic, urban visual poetry that is highly effective.

Real and invented characters and incidents are riveted together in such a manner as to make the author's disclaimer "This is not a novel", which occurs both in a preface and in the novel itself, problematical. For all the straight didactic anti-capitalist intent, it can be said that Ford and Citroën and Deterding are fictionalized, even luridly so, and that despite the documentation—or perhaps, stylistically, because of it ("1,200 cars, 18,000,000 net profit, 33 fingers")—there is a continuous sense of the imagination at work, stoking fires, building climaxes, placing ironies like plaques. For most Western readers of Ehrenburg, even if they know Julio Jurenito, the book will reveal yet another aspect of this enigmatic writer, and for novel readers in general it provides a pungent, high-klaxoned ride along the arteries of the 1920s.