Porsche and Volkswagen are set to uncouple—at last

PURCHASING A NEWVWVWVWVWVW Porsche often involves a long wait. If limited production and aloof dealers weren’t enough of a bottleneck, some buyers face further delays after a fire that broke out last week mid-Atlantic on a ship carrying 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, from the stable of brands owned by Volkswagen ().As with Porsches, so, too, with Porsche the company. Talk of letting investors buy a slice of the illustrious sports-car maker has been in the air almost ever since it combined with after Porsche’s audacious attempt to take over the much larger German company in 2008. That misadventure brought Porsche close to bankruptcy, averted thanks to a rescue by . One upshot of the affair was for the Porsche brand to become ’s wholly owned subsidiary in 2012. Another was that the holding company controlled by the secretive Porsche and Piëch families, descendants of the sports-car maker’s founders, became ’s largest shareholder.