You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again.

You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier. If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers. You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again. Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world. But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.