I spent much of Tuesday poring over news reports and court documents to figure out the options for my 2015 Volkswagen Sportwagen TDI under VW’s proposed $14.7 billion make-good for skirting emissions rules.
The takeaway: There won’t be a quick and tidy resolution to this mess for many VW owners.
I had assumed that, because my car has the newest of the three affected 2.0-liter turbodiesel engines -- a Generation 3 that introduced a new diesel-exhaust after-treatment system -- it would be easier for VW to fix.
That wishful thinking got swatted down right there on Page 5 of the 225-page court document outlining VW’s settlement: “At the present time, there are no practical engineering solutions that would, without negative impact to vehicle functions and unacceptable delay, bring the 2.0 Liter Subject Vehicles into compliance with the exhaust emission standards.”
I had naively figured VW would have at least been moving in the direction of cheating less over the years by getting the engines closer to compliance. But after reading the court documents, it’s not clear to me whether the Gen 3 engines are any cleaner than the older ones.
So the easiest and quickest option is to sell the car back to VW, which will begin buybacks as early as this fall. VW would pay me between $26,282 and $30,743 -- a combined figure that includes the car’s pre-scandal fair value plus about seven grand for my troubles, according to court documents. (I paid around $29,000 in May 2015 for a silk blue Sportwagen SE model, a mid-trim that includes leather, a premium sound system and massive sunroof).
Fair enough. It would let me walk away ahead of the game -- basically having had free use of a new car for 16 months -- and I could move onto something else.
But I suspect I feel like many other VW customers do: I like the car, and don’t want to give it up.
All it takes is a quick scan of car-buying sites for another wagon priced at $30K or less that’s fun to drive, has a quiet, premium-level interior and would return 45 mpg on my long highway commute. There aren’t any.
Maybe that’s because combining all of those attributes was too good to be true in the first place. It could be that VW’s vaunted engineers will never come up with a fix that would preserve the combination of peppy, low-end torque and great fuel economy that has me hooked.
For now, I’m willing to forgo my payday as long as two years to see if they can. VW has until May 2018 to finalize a fix. If they don’t, I can sell it back at that point.
Of course, that option will leave me with two years of wondering just how much more I’m polluting the air by continuing to drive it.
