Your diesel Volkswagen or Audi is likely worth far less today than it was prior to September 18, 2015. Car dealers and insurance companies refer to this as diminished value. This is particularly upsetting in that you likely paid a premium for the vehicle because it was sold as "clean diesel.

Diminished value is typically used in the car business to refer to the lower value of a car that has been involved in an accident and then fully repaired versus an identical make and model car that has never been in an accident. Although a vehicle may have been expertly repaired, the used car market usually diminishes the value of cars that have been wrecked or recalled or the subject of some very negative action.

There are several reasons that vehicles involved in this debacle created by Volkswagen will likely suffer dramatic diminished values.

1. Since 2009, Volkswagen has been selling these vehicles at a premium because of the supposed technology of clean diesel engines. The allegations are that VW engineers simply hacked software in the cars to trick the testing process, while under normal driving conditions these vehicles spewed out as much as 40 times the legal limit of exhaust fumes. The cars should not even be on the road. Even if Volkswagen does make repairs to the emissions system to bring the vehicles into compliance, the "repaired" cars will get worse gas mileage and suffer poorer performance than the un-repaired cars. But the un-repaired cars may not be allowed on the road as they spew unacceptable levels of pollutants. A catch-22!

2. The vehicles are the subject of one of the biggest alleged frauds in corporate history - involving 11 million cars and will misconduct on the part of the 2nd largest car manufacturer in the world. These vehicles promise to do very poorly at time of trade-in and at wholesale car auctions and at the used car retail level.