Tesla Wrap Template Guide

Why this page exists

Tesla's teslamotors/custom-wraps repository hands you a PNG per model and a short README about file limits. What it does not hand you is a UV map: no panel labels, no coordinates, no statement of which rectangle of the atlas ends up on the driver's door. If you want to place a stripe so it lines up across the door and the rear quarter, you are guessing and iterating.

In April 2026 someone filed issue #80, "Expose UV mapping / model metadata to enable community wrap tools", asking Tesla for exactly this. It has never been answered. In the discussion, the author of a third-party wrap editor described having reverse-engineered the mapping by hand, per model, because there was no other way to build a tool that could show you where your artwork would land.

That is the gap this page fills. It is an observational description, published openly so nobody else has to redo the measurement from scratch. If Tesla ever answers #80 with real metadata, this page should be replaced by it.

What a Tesla wrap template actually is

Each template is a UV atlas: a flat image whose coordinates map onto the 3D surface of the car. It is not a side-elevation drawing, which is why a design that looks correct as a flat image often looks nothing like you expected once applied. Three visual elements carry meaning:

• White regions — paintable surface. These are the UV islands. Whatever colour you put here shows on the corresponding body panel.
• Black strokes — island outlines. Thin boundary lines showing where each island ends. They are guides for you, not geometry. Paint over them freely; they exist so you can see the edges.
• Fully transparent background — not paintable. Alpha zero. These pixels correspond to no surface on the car. Filling them adds file size against your 1 MB budget and changes nothing on screen.

All 12 templates are 8-bit RGBA PNGs. On the 11 car templates, between 53.8% and 73.6% of pixels are fully transparent — so on a typical car, well over half the canvas is dead space. The Cybertruck is the exception at 38.6%, because its islands are packed far more tightly. Either way the point holds: the paintable area is a minority of the image, and a full-canvas gradient is mostly being spent on pixels the car will never render.

Layout of the 11 car templates

The car atlases share a consistent structure. Flipping one horizontally and diffing it against itself gives 4.1% to 11.4% differing pixels across the eleven. That is a near-mirror. Inspection of where the differences fall shows they are almost entirely antialiasing along the black outline strokes, plus one genuine structural asymmetry: the charge port, which exists on one side of the car and therefore on one side of the atlas.

From that symmetry, the layout reads as:

• Mirrored body-side islands, left and right. The flanks — doors, front and rear quarters, rockers — occupy mirrored regions on either side of the canvas.
• Horizontal-surface islands stacked down the vertical centre. Hood, roof and trunk sit in the middle column, arranged front-to-back. This column is where the symmetry axis runs, which is why it is the only place a design can cross from one side of the car to the other continuously.
• Usually an inset margin — but not always. On most car templates the opaque content stops short of the canvas edge. The Model 3 opaque bounding box is (11, 22, 1017, 1021) within a 1024x1024 canvas — an 11-pixel margin on the left, 22 at the top. Margins vary widely, though: Model Y Standard (2025+) has a 135-pixel left margin, while two templates touch the edge outright — Model Y Performance (2025+) at the top, and Model X (2021+) on the left and bottom. Do not assume a safe border exists; check your own model rather than trusting a rule of thumb.

The practical consequences follow directly. Text on the flanks has to be drawn twice. Because left and right are mirrored, lettering that reads correctly on one side of the car will read backwards on the other unless you author each side separately. A design that crosses the vertical centre wraps over the top of the car, not around its nose. And a stripe placed to run along the flank must be drawn as two mirrored strokes, not one continuous band across the canvas.

The Cybertruck template is structurally different

Cybertruck is not a variation on the car layout — it is a different atlas. The same horizontal-flip test returns a 49.9% mismatch, roughly four times the worst car template. Whatever it is doing, it is not mirroring left and right about the canvas centre the way the cars do.

Two further differences matter when you are drawing on it:

• It is 1024x768, not square. The only non-square template Tesla ships, and the one that contradicts the README's stated "512x512 to 1024x1024" range. Authoring a Cybertruck wrap on a square canvas guarantees a wrong result.
• Its islands bleed to all four canvas edges. Where most cars leave a margin on every side, Cybertruck islands run right up against the boundary. There is no safe margin, and artwork placed at the very edge will be used rather than falling into transparent dead space.

If you take one thing from this page: do not reason about a Cybertruck wrap using anything you learned from a Model 3 or Model Y template.