German steering wheels on lorries were among the last to remain big because IIRC their version of construction and use regs demanded that a lorry should be able to limp to a garage or home by using ‘armstrong’ manpower (or worker-state womanpower in East Germany). In fact I once did this with an F8-cabbed MAN with failed power-assistance and limped home from Belgium no probs. This rule was eventually relaxed and I place the time at about the period when the Actros came in because it had a steering wheel with a smaller diameter. That was about 20 years ago.
From what I remember, the same rule applied to window winders. The passenger window could be electric but the driver’s window had to be manual in case of power failure. Ro