Scenario is as follows

I have a car object, backed by a car table, and the car has wheels, backed by a wheels table, and the car is made by Honda, backed by a manufacturer's table. When I save the car in Hibernate, I want the cars table to be updated, as well as the wheels table, but NOT the manufacturers table. We shouldn't be saving anything to Honda/the manufacturer's table.

How do i achieve this in hibernate?

This is easy.
Just specify the cascade options.
I don't know if you're using annotations, but If you are,then it would be

Car{

@ManyToOne(cascade={CascadeType.REFRESH}, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
Manufacturer m;

@ManyToMany(cascade={CascadeType.ALL}, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
Collection<Wheel> wheels;


}