This ad purports to have sold a real General Motors Corporation EV1 up in Canada for close to US $340,000! Since the EV1 was never marketed there, and technically all of the cars that were leased to consumers were crushed to avoid issues with future maintenance, what’s going on here? If this is the real thing, I hope GM doesn’t get all lawyered up on the new owner. I’d like to see them put the car back on the road and use it as part of the Volt marketing campaign. After all, the EV1 did pretty much start the whole craze.

Big-shot automotive journalist John McElroy is calling for the revival of GM’s EV1 with a decently well-reasoned argument. It’s true, bringing back the EV1 would seem like the ultimate no-brainer. In 1996, when the little plug-in electric was introduced, gas was around a dollar a gallon—now it’s four. And even before it got that bad, tons of people who saw Who Killed The Electric Car? swore they’d own one of those little jelly beans in a second. So what’s the problem? Well, there was so much cloak-and-dagger surrounding the conception, marketing, and eventual failure of the EV1, that to bring it back now as if nothing had happened would constitute a major loss of face for GM. I asked GM’s Dave Barthmuss about it when he was in town recently: assuming that the parts needed to assemble new EV1′s haven’t been destroyed (they haven’t), could GM perhaps build a limited run of the vehicles, at the very least as a stop-gap measure to satisfy demand until the Volt is ready to go? I was shushed before the proposition was even out of my mouth, as if Dave had heard it a million times. GM’s position on the matter is that the EV1 would never meet modern safety standards (which is probably true), that battery technology has come so far since ’96 that the car would basically require an entirely new powerplant, that it would cost them more to make than they could sell it for, and that no one would really buy it, even if they say they would. Are they really just worried that an EV1 revival would steal the Volt’s thunder? Would problems with the EV1 sour the public on the Volt before its debut? Would you buy one?