The lack of circularity in the automotive industry leads to the loss of valuable and important raw materials. Resulting economic dependencies in procurement and environmental burdens could be reduced by implementing a strategy to systematically retrieve secondary raw materials and components for vehicle production. In this context, in 2023 the EU proposed a new regulation for handling End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs) to support circular economy practices in the automotive industry. Semi-automated processes offer efficiency and scalability for the handling of ELVs. This results in the need to analyze the feasibility of automation steps in order to make decisions for process development. For this purpose, a systematic approach to identify automation potentials for automotive disassembly and to embed associated processes into a larger economic assessment is developed. In order to achieve this, the complexity and suitability of the automated processes is evaluated, based on relevant automation criteria and theoretical approaches from literature. In combination with the economic assessment of the alternative manual route, a comparison of both variants is performed that delivers insights into the conditions under which automation is possible and sensible as well as the circumstances under which manual process control is more appropriate. The application of our evaluation methodology allows for a detailed assessment of the consequences of establishing automated disassembly and thus helps in the development of component-specific disassembly process decisions. The presented case study exemplarily demonstrates the methodological approach for the evaluation of economic effects of automation technologies. It is pointed out that the quantity of processes to be performed as well as the period under consideration have an effect on the economic differentiation between manual and automated disassembly.