The fallout from Volkswagen’s massive emissions scandal earlier this year is not nearly complete. While the auto company already faces rampant distrust and dismal sales, it’s also being ordered by federal and state regulators to fix all of its emissions-cheating cars—a huge, expensive task. 
 
 But dozens of Silicon Valley leaders—including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former eBay president Jeff Skoll, and Energy Innovation CEO Hal Harvey—are arguing that it isn’t even worth it. 
 
 “A great sum of money [will] be wasted in attempting to fix cars that cannot all be fixed,” wrote 44 tech leaders in an open letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) last Thursday (Dec. 17). 
 
 Instead of focusing on fixing diesel cars, Musk and his colleagues said, Volkswagen should be required to put its resources toward becoming a zero-emissions car company. 
 
 The letter, which is available in full here, offers a detailed plan, proposing that CARB “release VW from its obligation to fix diesel cars already on the road in California;” direct VW instead to “accelerate greatly its rollout of zero emission vehicles;” and to require that VW invest in R&D or new plants “in the amounts that they otherwise would have been fined,” with the share of fine dollars that would have gone to California being used for investment specifically in California. 
 
 The letter authors note: 
 
 “In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change.” 
 
 At this month’s climate conference in Paris, 13 countries pledged to make only emissions-free cars in 2050 and beyond. Tesla, Musk’s own car company, doesn’t sell any cars that run on diesel. 
 
 Zero-emissions cars—”which by their very nature,” the authors of the CARB letter note, “have zero emissions and thus present zero opportunities for cheating”—are coming more and more into the mainstream nowadays. If California regulators were to heed the letter from Musk and his colleagues, Volkswagen—as the world’s biggest carmaker—would certainly be speeding up the global transition. ||||| The VW emissions scandal is mainly the result of physics meeting fiction. In the simplest terms, we have reached the point of de miminis returns in extracting performance from a gallon of diesel while reducing pollutants, at least at reasonable cost. Unsurprisingly, and despite having the greatest research and development program in diesel engines, VW had to cheat to meet current European and U.S. standards. Meeting future tighter diesel standards will prove even more fruitless. 
 
 For a significant fraction of the non-compliant diesel cars already in the hands of drivers, there is no real solution. Drivers won’t come in for a fix that compromises performance. Further, solutions which result in net greater CO2 emissions, a regulated pollutant, are inappropriate for CARB to endorse. Retrofitting urea tank systems to small cars is costly and impractical. Some cars may be fixed, but many won’t and will be crushed before they are fixed. 
 
 A giant sum of money thus will be wasted in attempting to fix cars that cannot all be fixed, and where the fix may be worse than the problem if the cars are crushed well before the end of their useful lives. We, the undersigned, instead encourage the CARB to show leadership in directing VW to “cure the air, not the cars” and reap multiples of what damage has been caused while strongly advancing California’s interests in transitioning to zero emission vehicles. 
 
 The solution we propose for VW and the CARB is to, in a legally enforceable form: 
 
 1./ Release VW from its obligation to fix diesel cars already on the road in California, which represent an insignificant portion of total vehicles emissions in the State, and which cars do not, individually, present any emissions-related risk to their owners or occupants 
 
 2./ Instead, direct VW to accelerate greatly its rollout of zero emission vehicles, which by their very nature, have zero emissions and thus present zero opportunities for cheating, and also do not require any enforcement dollars to verify 
 
 3./ Require that this acceleration of the rollout of zero emissions vehicles by VW result in a 10 for 1 or greater reduction in pollutant emissions as compared to the pollution associated with the diesel fleet cheating, and achieve this over the next 5 years 
 
 4./ Require that VW invest in new manufacturing plants and/or research and development, in the amounts that they otherwise would have been fined, and do so in California to the extent that California would have been allocated its share of the fines 
 
 5./ Allow VW some flexibility in the execution and timing of this plan by allowing it to be implemented via zero emission vehicle credits. 
 
 In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. 
 
 The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW. ||||| Tesla Motors Chief Executive Elon Musk and more than three dozen others are urging California regulators to push Volkswagen AG toward more environmentally friendly vehicles after the German auto giant recently used software to cheat on emissions tests with diesel-powered cars. 
 
 California regulators should direct Volkswagen to “accelerate greatly its rollout of zero-emission vehicles,” Mr. Musk and others wrote in a letter Thursday to Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board. Unlike vehicles powered by gas...
– More than 40 technology leaders have proposed a radical solution for how Volkswagen can fix its emissions-test-cheating vehicles: don't. Instead Quartz reports the 44 signers—including Tesla's Elon Musk—of a letter sent to the California Air Resources Board on Thursday suggest putting all the money and resources that would have gone toward fixing diesel cars already on the road toward speeding up production of emissions-less electric vehicles. "Cure the air, not the cars," they write in the letter. Earlier this year, Volkswagen found itself in hot water when it was revealed it had installed software to cheat emissions tests in nearly 500,000 diesel cars sold in the US, the Wall Street Journal reports. Quartz reports regulators have ordered Volkswagen to fix all emissions-test-cheating vehicles currently on the road. In their letter, Musk and the other signers argue it's no longer worth it from a financial or performance standpoint to keep trying to make diesel cleaner, and many owners won't get the fix anyway. According to the Journal, they argue putting that money—as well as money from potential fines—toward electric cars and new zero-emission plants and technologies would reduce pollution 10 times what fixing the individual cars would. They also point out zero-emission cars have no way to cheat emissions tests, Quartz reports. Neither Volkswagen nor CARB have responded directly to the letter, with a CARB spokesperson telling the Journal only that their "focus has and will continue to be cleaning the air and advancing the cleanest vehicle and fuel technologies.”