Abstract
It is in the recent years that the automotive branch has been remarkably affected by the global economic crisis. The companies located in Poland make up a significant element of the global system. The paper analyses the most important data that describe the activities of these companies in the years of the crisis (the research covered the period from 2005 through 2012). It is possible to formulate the thesis that this is the group of entities that coped relatively well with the difficult situation encountered in the environment. Thanks to the conducted analysis it was possible to point to the regularities that increased the possibility success in this kind of circumstances.