The Dreamer
That's an easy one for me. When a car is in development each part is given a budget or cost target which add up to a total that will translate into an acceptable MSRP. You can't go over target without God's approval
Tires are same and every effort is made to use an existing tire so it is speced and then put out for bid and an award is given to a company.
When a prototype starts to roll the actual tires start to be tested and this can go in many directions including changing the tires and making them model unique which is expensive as hell.
It's all between the designer, the blind dude, marketing and the PPM with the blind dude having priority.
Kind of a left handed answer but it's not an exact process. Usually the tire maker will provide a "guest" engineer to work beside the Nissan designer to finalize things.
It should be noted that in the old days tire makers would practically give tires to us so that consumers would replace them with same which is really where their money is. But they figured out that that is not what consumers do and could not care less whether the OEM chooses their product or not. This equals higher prices.
Does that help?
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