While the discussion of product variety has well advanced into assessing the impacts of any complexity induced into the manufacturing system, little is known about how to measure variant driven complexity costs and how product variety differs between emerging and established markets. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing the theory behind manufacturing complexity as a result of product variety and its main implications in the automotive industry supply chain. This analysis embraces a complexity cost model development proposal done by the University of Lueneburg and a comparison of the product variety among established and in emerging markets