The Geography of the Automotive industry

In the past manufacturing cars was a heavy industry involving many different facilities and lots of equipment. A good example of this is Henry Ford's River Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan. This is the factory where the famous Ford Model Ts were made. The factory was huge covering about 2,000 acres with around 1.5km squared of factory floor space in 93 buildings and employing over 100,000 people. The factory had its own power plant, steelworks, docks, glass works and rubber plant. It was capable of manufacturing the cars from just the raw materials. The factory was located along the River Rouge to allow access for barges transporting coal from Ford's mines further up the river. This coal was used to fuel the steelworks and other facilities like it.
Leading up to the Great Depression the U.S. was the leading manufacturer of cars, producing 90% of the worlds 32,028,500 cars. However after WWII they were only responsible for 75% of the worlds cars. This is likely due to the increase in production of vehicles by other nations during the war. The U.S. remained the largest manufacturer of cars until 1980 when it was overtaken by Japan. Since then the two nations have been overtaking each other ever few years until 2009 when China took the top spot. Then in 2012 China nearly doubled U.S. production by producing 19.3 million cars compared with the U.S.'s 10.3 million cars.

Top 20 Vehicle Producers (2013)

China	22,116,825
United States	11,045,902
Japan	9,630,070
Germany	5,718,222
South Korea	4,521,429
India	3,880,938
Brazil	3,740,418
Mexico	3,052,395
Thailand	2,532,577
Canada	2,379,806
Russia	2,175,311
Spain	2,163,338
France	1,740,000
UK	1,597,433
Indonesia	1,208,211
Czech Rep.	1,132,931
Turkey	1,125,534
Slovakia	975,000
Argentina	791,007
Iran	743,680

However the following chart shows that the largest producers aren't necessarily the largest exporters. 

Rank	Exporter	2015 Car Exports	% World Total
1.	Germany	US$152.7 billion	22.7%
2.	Japan	$86.1 billion	12.8%
3.	United States	$55.3 billion	8.2%
4.	Canada	$44.9 billion	6.7%
5.	South Korea	$41.8 billion	6.2%
6.	United Kingdom	$38.9 billion	5.8%
7.	Spain	$33.1 billion	4.9%
8.	Mexico	$32.8 billion	4.9%
9.	Belgium	$27.8 billion	4.1%
10.	France	$17.8 billion	2.7%
11.	Czech Republic	$16.9 billion	2.5%
12.	Slovakia	$14.1 billion	2.1%
13.	Italy	$14 billion	2.1%
14.	Hungary	$11.2 billion	1.7%
15.	Thailand	$9.4 billion	1.4%
16.	Turkey	$6.9 billion	1%
17.	Poland	$6.5 billion	1%
18.	Sweden	$6.3 billion	0.9%
19.	South Africa	$5.6 billion	0.8%
20.	India	$5.4 billion	0.8%

The automotive industry is the same today as it was in the past in the sense that large factories with lots of specialised machinery is needed. However it is much different to the past as robotics and computer systems have replaced many of the steelworks, glassworks etc. in factory complexes. This means that the factories are less tied to certain locations due to no longer needing certain materials such as large quantities of coal. They do still need good access in the form of motorways.

http://www.worldstopexports.com/car-exports-country/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_country