This website presents a very good explanation of the verbal idea and it's effect on word order in German: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~german/Grammatik/WordOrder/WordOrder.html.
However, there are not so many contrastive examples; the best is the difference between
Ich fahre gerne Auto, and
Ich fahre dieses Auto gern.
It would be a great aid to the intuition if you could suggest more such contrastive examples. I think the biggest hurdle for non-native speakers is when the verb complement is not a verb (particularly 1c, 1d, and 1f in the website above).