[WONT]Localization and related expenses

[Frankschtaldt]

Just from my observations ingame, most of the things that actually differentiate countries are city based modifiers, so i suspect that countries may not even exist as entities that effect statistics in the game.

Yeah, I'm not too sure about that either. All of the cities tell you which country they are in but that could just be part of their name. If it was an assigned attribute then maybe something like "vehicle must possess the same country attribute as the city in order to be sold here" and give each vehicle country attributes based off which markets it is designed for.
Another complication here is I'm pretty sure the borders of these rules have changed over time. I'm pretty certain all of the EU (with the exception of the UK that drives on the other side of the road) has the same design rules now but I'm pretty sure that wasn't always the case.

I may be able to propose something that may fit your requirements using current (or near future) mechanics.
I believe Eric has mentioned that eventually the customers will have certain preferences for certain types of components. For example, they prefer a 4 cylinder over a 1.
Perhaps you could have these preferences be roughly country based(practically city based) to heavily penalize designs outside of the design code/requirements.
Not an ideal solution, but its a thought i had.

I may be misinterpreting what you're suggesting here but it doesn't really seem appropriate. A markets tastes and rules are two different things a manufacturer has to contend with and I don't really think there's a way to make one system cover both.
If you don't match a markets tastes your sales will suffer but if you don't meet it's rules then you wont be allowed to sell there at all.
Also, the cost of meeting a new markets taste could be nothing, Japanese manufacturers didn't have to change their designs much at all to meet local tastes when first breaking into European markets but they (most likely, I can't actually support this claim with hard evidence) would have had to spend a decent amount of time and money meeting the regulations.

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..... Er, actually, I think I worked out what you meant and I think it could work.
Actually, it's a pretty good idea!