Together, the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) technologies provide a unique opportunity to develop various types of communication-based automotive applications. In this chapter, we focus primarily on four major aspects: (a) description of communication-based automotive applications, (b) investigating the application characteristics and network attributes, (c) classifying the applications into categories, and (d) defining market perspectives and deployment challenges for each class of applications. To date, many applications have been identified by the automotive research community. From a value or customer benefit perspective, these applications can be roughly organized into three major classes: safety-oriented, convenience-oriented, and commercial-oriented, and they vary significantly in terms of application characteristics. We begin by describing communication-based automotive applications that span both the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication modes. We follow a systematic classification methodology for such applications that goes through two major steps: characterization and classification. We focus on a rich subset of representative applications and characterize them with respect to plausible application-and networkingrelated attributes. The characterization process not only strengthens our understanding of the applications but also sets the stage for the classification step, since it reveals numerous Vehicular Networking Edited by