VW Will Pay Up To $7,000 Cash To Half A Million Diesel Owners: Report

If you are one of nearly half a million Americans with diesel Volkswagen, you may be entitled to up to $7,000 in cash straight from VW, as Automotive News reports. As for how you get your grubby hands on your money, well, that might not be so simple.

The payout will vary from $1,000 to $7,000 to all 480-odd thousand of you TDI owners, depending on the age and condition of your vehicle.

That's according to AN using information gathered from people familiar with the talks in relation to VW's expected $10 billion (out of a reserved $18 billion) Dieselgate payout. The average individual cash return should be $5000, as Reuters also reports.

Included in the payment is a buyback offer on your TDI, but the exact details are still being worked out in the talks. How this will play out for you, a TDI owner, is sort of confusing, as AN notes.

Car owners will be faced with complex calculations to figure out how much cash they might receive from Volkswagen, two of the people said, which could upset them and harm the carmaker's relationship with buyers even further.

In addition to paying you, VW will have to pay us as a nation for polluting our environment. That money will go through a fund set up by the Justice Department, with money then getting routed to individual states and then on to you:

The new fund will have an administrator hired by the Justice Department, one person said. States will be allocated funds, but they'll have to submit projects for approval based on criteria laid out in the court agreement. The fund administrator will audit projects. VW hasn't had any input into details regarding the remediation plan, the person said.

What's surprising is that VW doesn't seem to have finalized their TDI fix (really?), so you'd think that the whole case would stand still until then:

It's likely that VW won't have a final sign-off on its plan to fix the 2.0-liter cars, the person said. That's making the plan to compensate for environmental damage more important to regulators, since the diesel-powered cars remain on the road exceeding pollution limits.

But actually, regulators want the fund to get up and running so they'll be able to figure out how much smog VW is liable for:

The amount of money VW will pay into the fund will depend on a technical assessment by the regulators of how much excess smog-forming gases the non-compliant diesel cars emitted going back to 2009. They'll also estimate how much pollution to expect going forward from consumers who don't sell their cars back to VW or don't follow up on the recall repairs.

This all sounds not confusing in the least, and I'm sure all of you TDI owners won't have any trouble getting VW to give you money you deserve or help you get your polluting car out of your driveway. Wait. No. None of that.

CORRECTION: This article previously stated that money going to you, the TDI owners of this country, would first have to pass through your state. It turns out that's actually only related to the money that VW has to pay America as a whole for polluting our environment. The money it is paying you goes right to you through your class action suit, as reader 4play pointed out.