Volta Trucks wants to electrify truck deliveries in cities. It's taking a page from Tesla and Apple's playbook to do it.

• Volta Trucks has its eye on the niche inner-city delivery market, where electric trucks could replace existing fleets without requiring a professional driver.
• In an interview, CEO Carl-Magnus Norden explained Volta's unique truck design, and answered concerns about his lack of relevant experience in the field.
• The company's taking cues from Apple and Tesla to enter a quickly growing electric vehicle market.
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Carl-Magnus Norden isn't a car person. And he's much less a truck person.

But that's not keeping the Swedish entrepreneur from trying to electrify urban deliveries in some of Europe's biggest cities.

"To me, it's so obvious that this is the right thing to do," Norden said in an interview. "The industry is acting very slowly. Everybody is talking about 2030, 2040, but nobody feels the urge to do anything today."

The 65-year-old's previous acts have included investments in real-estate, mobile telecom, private equity, and other manufacturing. To learn the automotive industry, he's teamed up with Kjell Walöen, Volta's chief technology officer, who spent a decade at Volvo as well several years at Polestar and Ford.

The sparse team to date includes a small sales staff, and a handful of engineers in the Midlands in England, where the company will likely produce its first truck.

Volta plans to have a working demonstration model of its electric delivery truck by summer, and the designs so far are radically different than the diesel trucks making deliveries in cities today.

"The design of a truck today is very logical," he said. "You have a bulky diesel engine, a big gear box, and you want to maximize the load space so you push all of that forward and you wrap the cab around it."

With a completely different powertrain in place, Volta's able to completely redesign much of truck with these different priorities in mind. It's not unlike Tesla's "front trunk" or a passenger bus.

Perhaps most notably, however, is the drivers' seat. The operator is in the center of the cab, much lower to the ground (eliminating the need for a ladder and any associated jumping), and has a near 180-degree front view. According to Norden, this could help eliminate many of the tens of thousands of pedestrian deaths caused by drivers every year.

Thanks to its smaller size, the truck wouldn't require a professional Class C license in Volta's first target markets of London and Paris. That's key, given an industry shortage of drivers, Norden says.

First, it has to actually sell trucks. The idea is to start small, Norden says, again drawing inspiration from Tesla.

"Elon Musk is a fantastic guy," Norden said. "Of course I don't want to compare myself with him, but if we can get to moderate success in this, and get big OEMs starting to move faster, then I would be very happy."

But unlike Tesla, Volta won't own the factory.

"I like the way Apple do with their iPhone: the engineering, designing, et cetera," Norden said. "Then somebody else is doing the contract manufacturing and in the end we will take care of the truck, the market, and putting all of these pieces together."

In that respect, the company could fare better than Tesla, which burned through massive amounts of cash struggled to bring factories online.

"Our interest is not really in tying up all our capital in production," Norden quipped. "But also for speed. We want them to come to the market as soon as possible."

But everything after manufacturing, of course, is where things get most complicated. And Volta wants to be at "full production" by 2022. To get there, the company's targeting a fundraising round this year and has held talks with the "top 20" delivery companies and fleet managers as it begins its trials in London and Paris soon.

"If you would have said what I have said ten or 15 years ago, of course you would have been crazy and everybody would have said you are crazy," Norden said. "But as things start to shift, you could actually have a chance as a small, entrepreneurial person to be ahead of all the other guys. You can find your niche and thrive on that."

"In the beginning most people said I was crazy," Norden said. "But now it's fewer and fewer which is a good sign."