What part of Europe? When I got my license 15 years ago they were a minority, but already not that uncommon in Germany. E.g. a friend from school drove an old Merc with the 4(?) gear automatic. On the other end of the scale [at least to a pupil] the new BMW 645ci owned by another friend's parents also had an automatic (Google says it was a 6 gear automatic, nothing special; I only know it had paddles for manual shifting, but the details are lost on me because for some reason his parents never let us drive the V8). They only became more common since then. These days I mostly associate them with cheaper cars (which isn't a bad thing, just economics) and expect them to vanish into obscurity within the next decade.