For those who follow the VW diesel business, and the trend in Germany....there's a short update today. There are now 401,000 owners of diesel cars who are in the class-action lawsuit against VW now. Their intention? To get a German court to assign guilt and pay off the damages.
What is generally expected? No one can say clearly. In court-action, VW will do everything possible to prevent the case from proceeding. No one is suggesting that it'll even start in 2019, or even 2020.
If the court episode concluded with guilt.....how bad could the cost be? Again, you could be getting into the tens of billions. My guess is that VW would attempt to offer some incentive (taking your diesel car off your hands, then letting you purchase a new gas-powered VW, at a highly reduced price). The fact that the incentive might be half of the real value of the diesel car you have? That's probably going to be the chief problem for the court to overcome.
I won't suggest that this is the end of VW, but somewhere down the line....there's going to be some significant reduction in VW stock prices (currently at 148 Euro a share, but back before the crisis....it was around 200 to 250 Euro per share). The odds that other car companies will be dragged into diesel court activity? Probably all of those affected by city bans will be coming to sue their car-maker.
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