Payments are being made via EFT, AFAIK -- no reason on earth to wait until the middle of January!
Even if that's true (which I hope it is, and it seems logical that it would be), I haven't read confirmation of that. And I wouldn't be surprised that VW will take the slowest, least-efficient, least-logical approach. Which would be snail mailing the car loan payoff checks to the banks, and that whole process could easily take 12-17 business days as I'm guesstimating.
And considering we car loan people are just now getting through the system, VW probably isn't staffed up enough yet either. So before I panic and call the class counsel, I'm giving VW a little extra elbow room. Not that VW has earned extra elbow room. Not because they deserve elbow room. But because calling VW or the class counsel too soon will likely result in something like, "yes, they're working on it as fast as they can, and nothing like this has been done on this scale before, yadda, yadda, play VW the violin sap story, and please be patient for another week or two."
So instead of hearing that reaction by calling too soon, I'm just going to wait it out a little longer, make the car loan monthly payment as usual so my credit rating isn't hurt, and then call class counsel after a little more time. Then I'll hold their feet to the fire if needed. Color me skeptical, but I don't think VW has been meeting many deadlines, so this won't be the first.
The sad thing for VW, IMO, is that this whole buyback process could be a massive PR win for VW if they just handled it perfectly going forward. Alas, they dug themselves quite a hole with the scandal to start, and then decided to dig a little deeper with how they are executing the buybacks. Surprised?