And now, for its most expensive act: Volkswagen might buy back some of the 575,000 cars affected by Dieselgate in the United States.

Robert Giuffra, a lawyer defending Volkswagen against class-action suits, indicated during a court hearing at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week that if the German automaker is unable repair some of its diesel models in a timely manner, it might opt to simply buy them back, the New York Times reported.

“We might have to do a buyback or some sort of a solution like that for some subset of the vehicles, but that hasn’t been determined yet,” the Times quoted Giuffra as saying, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The buy-back option — which would apply to at least of the 2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel models — has been circulating since the Dieselgate scandal broke in September, when Volkswagen admitted it had fitted over 11 million four-cylinder diesel models worldwide with “defeat device” software designed to cheat emissions testing.

However, due to the huge costs associated (compared to a repair plan), it seemed wholly unlikely VW would ever turn to the virtual Hail Mary.

As it stands, though, it might be the fastest way to resolve at least part of the problem and show that VW is serious about making things right. While a repair plan was approved and implemented for affected diesel models in Europe, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Environmental Protection Agency rejected VW’s repair plan for cars in the U.S. Specifically, CARB said the repair plans failed to put “vehicles into compliance and reduce pollution.”

There are no other proposals on the table right now, and regulators and owners are growing increasingly frustrated with the German automaker by the day.

It’s unclear what VW would do with the cars afterward; also unclear is whether the company would ever be able to resell them. (Another option, of course, is to simply crush the cars, though that seems like a big undertaking.)

“We have no comment other than to say that Volkswagen continues to work cooperatively with EPA and CARB to resolve these issues as quickly as possible with approved remedies for the affected vehicles,” a spokesperson told Mashable.

Regardless of how you split it, there’s no easy way for Volkswagen to get out of the mess that it got itself into.

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