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Problem is, in case you missed carbsmith's post, the actual fines, fees, and lawsuit settlement is 2.7 billiion USD. Most of the rest is a worse case scenario for buy backs, which most of the cars can be fixed for much less money than having to buy back the cars. Clearly at this stage, VAG won't be buying back all the cars, no where near it, since 80% of them can be easily fixed with a software upgrade.
The problem is the 20% of cars that are a model year or two too old for the fix to be effective, and VAG themselves have decided that it would be cheaper in that case to offer a buy back rather than repair them.
I still think that Hindy knows a lot more than any of us do. Also consider the facebook postings he made about Audi. I believe that dieselgate is a very small faction of why Audi Sport pulled the plug on the WEC. The reasons are a lot more politically (motorsport politics) and ROI motivated than being cautious about how bad the financial cost of dieselgate could be.
And we also have to remember that the EU painted themselves into a corner as far as going after VAG though the EU's own actions, such as VAG's cheat devices essentially being legal when they were used (AKA, allowed but not permitted), and they screwed themselves (the EU) with their own biased, unreliable testing standards.
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