Intrusion detection is an important defensive measure for automotive communications security. Accurate frame detection models assist vehicles to avoid malicious attacks. Uncertainty and diversity regarding attack methods make this task challenging. However, the existing works have the limitation of only considering local features or the weak feature mapping of multi-features. To address these limitations, we present a novel model for automotive intrusion detection by spatial-temporal correlation features of in-vehicle communication traffic (STC-IDS). Specifically, the proposed model exploits an encoding-detection architecture. In the encoder part, spatial and temporal relations are encoded simultaneously. To strengthen the relationship between features, the attention-based convolutional network still captures spatial and channel features to increase the receptive field, while attention-LSTM builds meaningful relationships from previous time series or crucial bytes. The encoded information is then passed to detector for generating forceful spatial-temporal attention features and enabling anomaly classification. In particular, single-frame and multi-frame models are constructed to present different advantages respectively. Under automatic hyper-parameter selection based on Bayesian optimization, the model is trained to attain the best performance. Extensive empirical studies based on a real-world vehicle attack dataset demonstrate that STC-IDS has outperformed baseline methods and obtains fewer false-alarm rates while maintaining efficiency.