Recently it came to light that a portion of the regulators in California are considering whether or not they will let Volkswagen owners keep on driving the so called “dirty diesels” rather than force the automaker to buy the cars back. After a meeting a few weeks ago, one enforcement officer explained that at this time VW doesn’t appear to have discovered a way to modify or fix these cars to the level that California would pass.

“Our goal has been to fix the vehicles and return them to their certified configuration as expeditiously as possible,” Todd Sax, chief of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) enforcement division, was quoted as saying by Reuters. “Unfortunately, this may not be possible.”

For those not fully aware, VW admitted to building around 11 million vehicles which were intentionally designed to beat emissions tests. Effectively the vehicle software was written to identify when it was undergoing an emissions test, and during those times it would run much cleaner than when on the road. It was also reported that the cars are producing around 40 times the allowable amount of pollutants on the road.

CARB estimates that around 65,000 to 70,000 VW group cars with the 2.0-liter four cylinder, and about 16,000 with the 3.0-liter six-cylinder are on the road, and currently running such ‘defeat devices.”

Back in November 2015, Mary Nichols, the chair of CARB, mentioned that if they can not come to an agreement they believed that VW may ultimately have to buy back many of these vehicles. Unfortunately, no real decisions have been made, but we just thought it too funny that our highly air-conscious state of California may just let the vehicles stay.