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Former Tesla UI designer teases Cybertruck design, Full Self-Driving animations
A former Tesla UI designer’s renders of the Cybertruck design, along with never-before-seen Full Self-Driving animations, have been revealed from his personal website. Pawel Pietryka, who left Tesla in mid-March to pursue other interests, served the company for 4.5 years, frequently presenting new ideas and designs to CEO Elon Musk. After leaving the company, there were several new renders and animations that revealed the Cybertruck and Full Self-Driving animations that have remained elusive to the community.
The new renders and designs were recovered from Pietryka’s website but have now been removed following the Tesla community getting their hands on them. While it is not necessarily known if these were official Tesla renders and animations, the fact that they have disappeared from Pietryka’s website reveals that they could have been sensitive to Tesla’s designs and plans for future versions of FSD. Additionally, the Cybertruck UI animations could be utilized within the electric pickup when it hits the market later this year.
Cybertruck Render and Animation
Cybertruck UI is incredible. I can’t wait! pic.twitter.com/wZ9Zo8MYWu
— MotherFrunker #FSDBetaCanada ?? (@MFrunker) April 28, 2021
Pietryka’s Cybertruck rendering seems to show the vehicle’s interior, along with the planned animation and UI infrastructure that Tesla could use when the truck begins deliveries in late 2021. It appears to show a route and navigation summary that is similar to what real-world owners would view as they set out to drive their car to a destination. Relatively simple in design, the render and animations have not been seen before. With Pietryka being the former head of the UI design team at Tesla, there is likely some correlation between what was posted on his website and what Tesla will actually use within the Cybertruck.
The Cybertruck has been in development for several years and has undergone intense scrutiny from Tesla and its designers, along with potential owners since its unveiling in 2019. CEO Elon Musk has said that the Cybertruck underwent a slight redesign to make the truck slightly more compact. Most people were worried about getting the truck into their garage. Still, Musk was more concerned about the potential issues that the company could have with fitting it into the Boring Company tunnels comfortably. Musk told Joe Rogan earlier this year that Tesla adjusted the size by “around 3% or smaller. You don’t want it to be a couple of inches too big for the tunnel.”
Full Self-Driving Animations
A possible look at what V11 could bring. The designer who led the Tesla UI design left last month to start his own design company
Source: https://t.co/R9YGk7QmtH before it was taken down pic.twitter.com/85Mrh6oAUm
— Tesla Owners Online (@Model3Owners) April 28, 2021
The FSD Animation gave some owners and enthusiasts, like @Model3Owners, the idea that it could be a look at what Software Version 11 could bring. Tesla released some of the V11 features through the Holiday Update in late 2020, but there were several things that went unchanged. This could simply be due to FSD still being worked on, which Tesla outlined during the recent Earnings Call.
Musk said that Full Self-Driving Beta is continuing to “make great progress,” and Tesla is developing more extensive training software that will help with labeling. However, Tesla could be looking to redesign the Driving Visualization feature and could be leaning toward the design that Pietryka posted on his website. Like the Cybertruck render, this has also been removed.
As for Pietryka, he founded Moderne Grafik Anstalt Inc. in 2019, and it appears that his plans are to focus on this instead of Tesla’s work. He joined Tesla in 2016 after leaving Apple, where he crafted “new product narratives” and was responsible for hardware launches.
After 4.5 years at Tesla, today is my last day. I’ll miss these sweet fools so much, such incredible designers and humans. xo https://t.co/qNKcJCnZ7i
#tesla #productdesign #ui #uiux #ux #cybertruck #models #model3 #modely pic.twitter.com/PEgJAhH9CG— Pawel Pietryka (@pawelpietryka) March 11, 2021
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
