Seriously… a car analogy. Wow. And a pretty bad one at that.
But I will help you fix that analogy for free, since I feel nice today. A crack for DRM isn’t like adding artwork to a car to make it worth more.
If anything this is about a car that has certain defects that make it work less well than it should. E.g. you cannot switch into gear 5. It runs slower than it could. So people go and fix that, for free. Now the automobile maker takes that free fix and sells all new cars with it. Is that ok? There, still a crap analogy but arguably better than yours.
You ask if the cracks are released with permission to freely distribute? Actually no, they are not. Because they are marked illegal by the law. They should not be distributed since thats against the law. But its of course convenient for the publisher to use that work and distribute themselves. They are technically breaking the law themselves since they are applying illegal cracks to their own software. So thats ok then?
I don’t think this is about removing copy protection to sell it.
It is more about that the crack they are now selling officially has been seen as illegal by the publisher/game developer itself. People have worked on this for no monetary compensation and therefore provided free labour to remove DRM. Now the publisher is banking on this free work, pretty much legitimising the crack. But none of the money actually goes to anyone who cracked the game, since that was still illegal.
If the publisher had just removed DRM themselves and sold those copies, no one would be outraged. But they exploit the work of people they keep condeming for cracking their games.