Instead VW will be broken up into smaller more manageable companies, with tighter governmental oversight, and if it is done properly we'll have a stronger economy for it---one without the existence of a malignant massive company.
1. Nationalize part of the company hurting investors. 2. Auction the shares to the market 3. Profit$
This way a "too big to fail" company can continue running its business as usual while punishing the value of the company. That doesn't means that personal responsibilities are forgiven, any one that breaks the law should be prosecuted.
There are probably a lot of other solutions, the problem is that economics is not about economy but about politics.
Fines can be mitigated by raising prices so that equity-holders shift pain to consumers. Stripping equity on the other hand means that you change who profits from sales.
Perhaps we need to require of publicly-listed companies that they have a "registered acquirer" or the like--a company that all the employees would be moved to if the original company were forced out of existence. (Basically turning every Chapter 7 bankruptcy of a public company into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy by default.)
Then we could allow civil suits to kill companies with impunity, knowing their employees would just end up "passed to" another company willing to retain them for the same salaries performing the same duties.
The bigger issue is it seems there has been one executive scapegoat and no real punishment for the multitude of people involved.
While a company fine is good, if we were to gaol and heavily fine at a personal level anyone involved to the point of wiping out their net worth, and heavily fine anyone (if we cant show they were involved) who should have been in a position to know/stop this I suspect we would see a better result in these matters in future. IMO the bigger issue is every time we have one of these scandals the perpetrators seem to walk away without any personal punishment or direct consequence of their actions.