uksparx...
The WHOLE idea of moving to 50 Hz and double voltage, i.e. 220 was to stop American appliance exports -- indeed American electrical anything over a century ago.
THE LAST THING European manufacturers ever want to face is identical standards to the US. The reason is market size and manufacturing scale: one leads to the other.
If you look, many of the European manufacturers, in fact, will offer their stuff in ( by their standards ) exotic frequencies and voltages. The deal is that any such 'trick' production will always be limited distribution.
Now that more and more actual production is out of China, the nominal manufacturers may be even more willing to support American voltages. For them, all it might take is a phone call.
When you consider all of the hoops the end user must go through to use non-NEMA schemes even a price bump of 20 percent might be quite acceptable.
