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The car industry is in a period of transformation, from the traditional world of mechanical engineering to an increasingly software-defined vehicle (SDV) ecosystem with software becoming the center of the user experience. The new world of in-vehicle infotainment systems are not static dashboards, but dynamic ecosystems that think about the driver context, regional conditions and the future, and are updated through the cloud. As electric vehicles and connected cars emerge, the centerpiece is the advanced infotainment systems, which are no longer just the user interface of the car but the digital soul of the car.As this rapidly evolving field emerges, Ronak Kosamia has become one of the key drivers of next-generation infotainment software.
As a Senior Software Developer at CARIAD, the software organization of the Volkswagen Group, he helped write the foundations of Volkswagen’s SDV strategy. “We were not just writing applications – we were architecting modular software that broke away from classic car app ecosystems that powered the Volkswagen, Audi or Škoda brands with fundamentally different experiences, but tenets that were uniquely modular yet differentiated,” Ronak shares. “We were laying the groundwork for modular, cross-brand software that could power Audi, Volkswagen, and Škoda with a shared yet uniquely differentiated user experience.” His work touched critical areas including EV-aware navigation, 3D mapping, and climate control systems, functionalities now embedded in over a million vehicles expected to ship with the modules he helped design.
He tackled one of the toughest problems in an infotainment architecture at CARIAD. The challenge was to create layouts that were flexible, allowed for brand differentiation, and could change in real-time. He introduced factory and strategy design patterns into the Volkswagen navigation stack to allow screen orchestration to change dynamically based on the VIN, region, and user profile. This innovation reduced the engineering overhead drastically and improved reuse efficiency by three times. His decisions about software architecture were essential in creating a platform that scales to a global level without sacrificing local nuance.
An engineering vision rooted in performance, reliability, and adaptability, is what Ronak can boast of. Through RoomDB caching and smart sync mechanisms, he achieved a 30% reduction in cloud API load, a vital for ensuring responsiveness in areas with limited connectivity. By optimizing Jetpack Compose layouts and prefetch logic, infotainment screen load times were slashed by 40%, improving the driver’s first impression and interaction speed. “In a car, even milliseconds matter,” he says. “Every tap, every transition has to feel seamless and intelligent.”
Even prior to his tenure at CARIAD, he was promoted as a Technical Development Lead at General Motors, where he expanded his impact further upstream into embedded systems. At GM, he engineered a runtime configurability engine for Android Automotive that mimics Firebase Remote Config behavior, allowing real-time toggles of features without OTA cycles. The system is now in use across 20+ GM programs and has halved the turnaround time for implementing updates. His enhancements to the Vehicle HAL (VHAL), particularly in audio and diagnostics integration, also contributed to greater system modularity and fault tolerance.
Ronak consistently delivered over 80% test coverage across embedded and mobile layers, improving release stability and developer confidence. He also contributed to the broader engineering community through internal whitepapers at GM and Volkswagen, and as a published author of Driving Innovation: A Guide to Automotive Software Development. His upcoming blog series, Runtime Abstractions in Software-Defined Infotainment, aims to share deeper insights into the architectural philosophies he has helped champion.
