The paper investigates the contribution of the automotive industry to the domestic economies from a regional development point of view. The research examines the economies of the core countries (Germany, France and Italy) and the semi-peripheral countries (Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) in Europe comparing the results to the previous (mainly U.S.) researches. The paper will examine how the center-periphery location and the position in the global automotive supply chain affect the economic role of the industry as well as the automotive-related activities.Vehicle production is a vertically integrated system, in which the industry also involves many other activities that sell their products to other industries as well, therefore approaches regarding automotive-related activities are different in terms of scale of activities. Moreover, contribution of the automotive industry to the economy can be interpreted in a broad way, including downstream activities related to the use of the motor vehicle, and the socioeconomic employment as well. The broader definition of the automotive industry in this paper is based on this spill-over effect. The study defines the automotive spill-overs based on the nomenclature of the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE) to show how these activities contribute to employment, production and value added in the examined countries, highlighting the differences between the individual countries and different regions.