The Brain Behind The Dashboard, Meet The Architect Of Volkswagen's Next-Gen Infotainment

In the cars of this modern century, the dashboard is not only a set of buttons and screens, it serves a bigger purpose. It is the central hub for everything from navigation, music, climate settings, and even electric vehicle charging routes. As cars get smarter and more connected, what happens on those screens is becoming just as important as what’s under the hood.

At Volkswagen Group’s software division, CARIAD, one Senior Developer, Ronak Indrasinh Kosamia, has played an important role in shaping that experience. His work is helping to deliver a more personalized, flexible, and responsive infotainment system that is now rolling out across Volkswagen, Audi, and Škoda vehicles. While at CARIAD, the engineer led the development of several key applications, including those for navigation, EV routing, and climate control, that were all built using Android Automotive OS. But, as he shared, the real challenge was not just creating those apps, rather ensuring that they could work smoothly across different car models, countries, and even brands without having to build everything from scratch each time.

One major step forward came through using Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), a tool that allowed the team to reuse large parts of the code across both in-car systems and mobile devices. This helped speed up development, reduce errors, and ensure a more consistent experience for users. Another big win was a new layout system that could adjust in real time based on the vehicle, region, or brand. Thanks to this, Volkswagen Group can now bring new car models onto a shared software platform much faster—saving around 50% of the usual engineering time.

The professional also worked with his team on making the system faster and more responsive. By fine-tuning how screens are built and displayed, they managed to cut boot-up time by 40%. This means that drivers no longer have to wait as long for their screens to be ready when they start the car. Along with this, they also improved how live data, like traffic or charging station updates, is handled. By using tools like gRPC and Protobuf, the team made map loading and other cloud-based features faster and more reliable.

Personalization was another focus of his team where they built tools that allow the system to adapt based on who is driving, where they are, and what kind of vehicle they are in. At the same time, they had to follow strict safety rules, especially around screen interactions while driving. This meant building layouts that could change quickly while still being easy and safe to use.

All these initiatives have been making a difference. More than a million Volkswagen Group cars are expected to ship with software that includes parts of this architecture. Internally, the team saw big gains like tripling layout reuse across models and reducing deployment risks, using smarter over-the-air updates.

However, building a unified infotainment experience across different automobile firms came with major challenges. Kosamia shared that his team developed a modular layout system that could adjust in real time for different brands and regions, making the software highly adaptable. They introduced personalization tied to each vehicle’s VIN, allowing the interface to change based on location, driver profile, and car type. To meet safety standards without compromising user experience, they designed distraction-aware components using reactive layouts. And to manage unreliable cloud connections, they implemented local caching and smart syncing with gRPC to keep the system consistent and responsive.

Kosamia also shared his insights through his paper, “A Novel Plugin-Based Navigation Architecture for Multi-Brand, Multi-Screen Automotive Systems,” that introduces a plugin system which makes it easier to build and manage brand-specific screens in Android-based car infotainment systems.

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According to him, the biggest shift is that infotainment is no longer just a fixed set of screens. It is becoming more like a live system—one that adjusts in real time based on the driver’s needs, preferences, and surroundings. He suggested, “In my experience, the biggest shift in next-gen infotainment is toward runtime orchestration—where personalization, regulation, and branding collide. The solution isn’t more code—it’s smarter architecture: token-driven logic, composable layouts, and cross-platform sharing through technologies like Kotlin Multiplatform and Jetpack Compose.”

It is also believed that car dashboards will become even smarter, combining modular design with embedded intelligence and even AI. The goal is to give drivers a system that feels familiar, personal, and ready the moment they start the engine. For the automobile giant, and for the growing world of software-defined vehicles, this work is helping to shape how people experience technology on the road—one screen, one interaction, and one smart decision at a time.