I can’t find the meaning/existence of “automobile activists”.
It came from this article;
“The police claimed that the Citroen was at fault, but automobile activists quickly found witnesses who said that the Mercedes had crossed over into the central emergency lane reserved for ambulances and police cars.”
My wild guess is that they are anti-car activists.
Am I right?
Hi … automobile activists … I think it comes from ,you know, there are social activists , political activists , etc… . so I think it means people who are concerned with cars (Citroen and Mercedes are famous car brands of course, so I think this is a story talking about cars world like the animation movie of “cars” I don’t know) so perhaps it means people concerned with cars or defending cars’ rights or something 
but I’m not a native speaker though … I hope this is helpful for you
Hi, Hitomi.
I am a native speaker of English, but I do not know what “automobile activists” are. My best guess is that the phrase is simply a mistake. Can you give more context?
As Don says, it’s pretty unusual to talk about “activists” in the context of cars.
Nevertheless, I would agree with with m essam - I think this would generally be understood as people from, so to speak, the “car lobby”, i.e. people concerned with speaking up for car owners and their rights.
(If they were anti-car people, I think you would tend to talk in terms of “anti-car activists”.)
Thank you everyone! The meaning of the whole article is much clearer now
There seems to be another possible meaning - m_essam has already touched upon it - in that the ‘automobile activists’ got together to defend the marque Citroen against the big marque Mercedes, a kind of sticking up for the underdog.Here I would understand the ‘automobile activists’ to be fans of Citroen. “It’s a Citroen so its driver must be in the right!” “It’s a Mercedes so its driver must be wrong.”
Written by a former BMW driver, now demoted to a VW driver, still waiting to buy her first Mercedes - not ****** likely!