From GM to Volkswagen, Ronak Kosamia’s Code is Under the Hood of the World’s Smartest Cars

The auto industry is in the midst of its most revolutionary transformation in more than a century. Cars are not just mechanical devices anymore, they're becoming sophisticated, connected, software-defined platforms. From in-car entertainment to real-time diagnostics, from over-the-air updates to mobile app integration, software has become the driver of everything from user experience to operating safety. While automakers compete to produce "smarter" cars, the warfront has shifted from the assembly line to lines of code. The new car today has more software than a fighter jet, with millions of lines of code directing how the car works, learns, and communicates with its surroundings.

At the heart of this shift are engineers who not only understand cars but who architect the very digital frameworks that power them. Among the most influential of these software innovators is Ronak Kosamia, a technologist whose work at both General Motors and the Volkswagen Group has helped define the digital DNA of some of the world’s most iconic vehicles. From enabling subscription-based features and in-app controls to engineering secure, real-time communication between mobile devices and embedded vehicle systems, Kosamia’s code is now an integral part of millions of vehicles on the road today.

This experts work has led to visible, measurable impact. He also designed code modernization initiative that cut code duplication by 40% and accelerated feature delivery by 50%, largely by introducing OTA-aware patterns and runtime behavior configuration. His work on a secure, tokenized identity vault helped reduce personally identifiable information (PII) exposure risk by 85% and supported millions of annual subscription transactions. By leading technologies like AWS Lambda, GraphQL, and Firebase, he boosted real-time diagnostics sync efficiency by 30%, making connected vehicles faster, smarter, and more responsive.

At CARIAD, his platform-driven modules are expected to ship in more than a million additional vehicles by 2026. His emphasis on region-specific layout optimization improved infotainment performance by 40% while maintaining brand distinction across Volkswagen, Audi, and Škoda. In total, his architectural strategies have unlocked over $5 million in annual engineering savings through platform reuse across both embedded and mobile stacks.

Kosamia’s technical leadership is backed by a deep research orientation. He authored a widely cited paper titled “Dynamic Overlay Systems for Real-Time Infotainment Personalization”, published in the International Journal on Science and Technology. He has also contributed internally at GM through whitepapers on secure identity vaults and HAL-based system hooks, and is a platform contributor to CARIAD’s SDV Architecture Playbooks. His upcoming blog series will explore cross-platform UI strategies and token isolation methods for modern vehicles. As an IEEE member and published technologist, his work continuously bridges research and implementation, driving innovation from concept to cockpit.

Interestingly None of this came without significant challenges. From maintaining stability in performance-critical embedded environments while integrating cloud-based features, to engineering tokenized identity storage that is both secure and session-aware, Kosamia has consistently delivered solutions to problems that many had not tackled before. He pioneered layout orchestration engines to eliminate code duplication across brands, and migrated key data pipelines to gRPC and Protobuf to meet the real-time expectations of modern users.

Reflecting on his career, Ronak notes that the modern vehicle is more than just a machine it is a networked software platform, often more complex than a smartphone. His experiences at GM and Volkswagen have led him to prioritize modularity, configurability, and privacy-by-design across every layer of the vehicle tech stack. For him, future-ready mobility lies in decoupling feature logic from vehicle variants, allowing brands to innovate rapidly without being slowed by redundant engineering.

With cross-device reuse by virtue of KMP, personalization through AI, and privacy frameworks built in on the horizon, Ronak Kosamia continues to work to build the invisible but crucial software layers that turn vehicles intelligent, dynamic, and secure. The wisest cars of tomorrow will not be characterized by sensors or chips, but by the accuracy, prescience, and robustness of the code written in the background.