The solution is essentially not all that complicated. A stalling approach could hit a nerve. VW’s needs to find the person(s) responsible and turn a new leaf.

If you were to believe VW insiders, emission investigators have quite a lot of ground to cover than just navigate privacy laws, since those in the know did go to great lengths to cover their tracks and keep things hushed up.

As per Bloomberg, the staff at VW who were in the know of the diesel emission before it exploded onto the world stage, used dozens of code words to camouflage emission cheating activities, making finding any actionable evidence pretty hard for emission investigators.

For example, they would use words such as “acoustic software,” to refer to the diesel emission. This kind of camouflaging along with old inadequate computers has supposedly made it rather challenging to pin the blame of the illegal behavior on one specific individual.

On its part, although Volkswagen has acknowledged the problem it has said it will only comment on it on the second half of April, when it intends to table a full report on what went wrong.

However, given the above scenario it is unlikely that the report will meet the deadline. Even if it were to do so, since it has to discuss its earnings on April 28, it is very likely that it will not include anything material but will only include preliminary findings.

Ever since the scandal erupted, delays have been the norm: Volkswagen has had to delay its earnings report, it had to delay its shareholder’s meetings, and it even delayed reporting to a U.S. court deadline for a solution to emission scandal.

Any further delays could set off investors and test the limit of their patience. Essentially, investors want to know that the Europe’s biggest car manufacturer wants to turn a new leaf and oust whoever is responsible for the cheating.

If they do not get a sufficiently good answer, it is very likely that they may just talk through their votes, pack up their dollars and invest elsewhere.