For owners who want to take their chances and keep their current vehicle, Mr. Wilhite suggests extending their warranty for two years with unlimited mileage and giving current diesel owners who buy a new one from Volkswagen someday a nontrivial amount of money to put toward a new one.

“Volkswagen should reimburse people if that’s what they want, but they should have a right to choose,” said Tony Martins, who has owned over 100 Volkswagens himself over the years and is the resident Volkswagen expert at my old service shop, County Auto Repair in Somerville, Mass. Choice, however, adds to the company’s administrative costs, so it remains to be seen whether the company will offer more than one option to consumers.

While there is a precedent for buybacks in one form or another — the Transportation Department forced Fiat Chrysler to buy back Jeeps two months ago — Jack R. Nerad of Kelley Blue Book says he doesn’t think it’s likely that Volkswagen will volunteer to do so. The cost is enormous, and there may be plenty of people willing to take their chances on a repaired vehicle for whatever reason. Mr. Nerad suggested that Volkswagen’s most likely action would be to offer to fix the cars and write much smaller checks to the owners in the hope of pre-empting class-action lawsuits.

That somewhat muted result would not much surprise the singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert. He’s the first person I think of when I think about Volkswagen, thanks to his ode in verse and music to the beloved VW Beetle he drove in the first half of the 1980s and repaired with plywood and screws.

“I’m heading towards 60, and I have become a bit of a fatalist,” Mr. Gilbert said this week. “How organic is our food? What is the efficacy of the medicine we buy over or under the counter? I don’t believe VW will go under, and I would never believe that they would give me a full check for the car of my dreams that wasn’t a VW.”

Even if it’s a partial check, the measurable damage per customer is well into the thousands of dollars. After all, people paid a premium for diesel vehicles (and their fuel) in many instances. Now, there may be a performance loss once the fix is made, not to mention that resale values are not likely to be as high as they otherwise would have been.