So if -for example- you knew the details of fabrication of your car: you consider that you'd still buy a car with a chassis that was deliberately weakened by an employee, instead of just buying a car with an -unknowingly- faulty chassis?
Why would you accept something that, if not tampered, would be better than the alternative? When there's bad intentions or tampering, you'll have a result that is broken to some degree for sure. If everyone does their jobs as good as they can, you'll only face a chance of something being broken. You can always improve over mistakes, not so much over bad intentions.
Isn't this close to how computer proccessors are sold?
I never checked this, but I always thought that slower CPUs are just CPUs with some 'production faults' in it. Basically, the manufacturer always tried to make 300mhz CPUs, but sometimes they didn't reach that speed so they sold them as 233mhz, 166mhz.
Now I was under the impression that most people didn't know this, so most people were buying CPUs which were just designed to be slow, but in fact they were accidentally slower.
This is exactly your car example, and there is nothing unethical about it -- either way.
I still don't see the analogy. The lower quality was not intentional and, what's more, they clearly labeled it as an inferior product. This seems more akin to designing a processor so that it will fail just out of its warranty period and you need to buy a new one, but not mentioning that to anyone.
Your car example is flawed. If I knew that a given car has a defect, I simply wouldn't buy it, period, regardless of how and why the defect was introduced.
Why would you accept something that, if not tampered, would be better than the alternative? When there's bad intentions or tampering, you'll have a result that is broken to some degree for sure. If everyone does their jobs as good as they can, you'll only face a chance of something being broken. You can always improve over mistakes, not so much over bad intentions.