Polestar's UX/UI lead joins robotics start-up

Polestar's Gothenburg design team will be on the hunt for a new UX/UI lead as Sid Odedra, who joined in January 2025, has made a surprise switch to budding robotics company Figure AI. 

It is not entirely unexpected: the British designer holds a firm interest in robotics and bleeding-edge technology, as he told Car Design News last year. “My background in robotics, experience in design and a keen interest in emerging technologies help to forecast the impact new technologies will have on human progress,” he said. “The key is to deeply understand their potential to bring real value to people."

Having spent just under a year and a half with Polestar, the lure of working on next-generation humanoids was apparently too strong. "A new chapter begins with swapping four wheels for two legs," Odedra announced on 18 May 2026. "I just couldn’t say no!"

Odedra will join a team that counts former car designers from the likes of Karma, Rivian and Ford, and many of those job titles at Figure feel quite familiar: 'lead surface designer', 'visualisation specialist', 'senior CMF designer' etc. 

The company is led by Brett Adcock, the founder of Archer, another start-up which has been working on eVTOLs. Figure, meanwhile, has been officially running for around four years at this point and envisions helpful domestic robots that can serve (literally) as waiters, housekeepers and more. 

Robotics is clearly of burgeoning interest to car designers. Italdesign's new head of design told us recently that he too sees this as the next frontier and compared its current status to the 'golden age' of car design. 

"Cars are the exciting thing right now, but I see a strong future for robotics too which is very exciting," Jose Navarro told Car Design News. "We are really imagining something, and the same can probably be said with cars 60 or 70 years ago. Robotics is brand new and it gives me that feeling of 'wow, we are really inventing something' and it's beautiful."