This paper presents an overview of the main copper-based automotive Ethernet communication standards, with an emphasis on the existing P802.3ch IEEE standard covering 2.5-10Gb/s as well as the future P802.3cy standard for up to 50Gb/s full duplex communication. The requirements and key challenges of the automotive physical layer (PHY) are discussed and a 9-bit source series terminated (SST) TX-DAC driver with added echo canceler is proposed for the transmitter. The fabricated TX solution is realized in 22nm FD-SOI technology, and is fully compliant with the P802.3ch standard, proving a 1Vppd PAM-4 output signal, >0.95 RLM while operating up to 11.2Gb/s. At Nyquist frequency the SFDR is better than 54.4dBFS while consuming only 2mW/Gb/s per DAC. A bandwidth-extended TX architecture is implemented covering also the P802.3cy standard, which enables PAM-4 signaling up to 14GBaud achieving an SFDR and ENOB of 57.8dB and 8.1 bit respectively at Nyquist rate.