GCP – How Renault Group is using Google’s software-defined vehicle industry solution

It’s funny to think of Renault Group, the massive European car manufacturer, as a software company, but in many ways, it is. Renault Group subsidiary Ampere Software Technology is dedicated to developing and integrating advanced software solutions for intelligent electric vehicles, aiming to create software-defined vehicles (SDVs) with enhanced customer experiences and new services. 

Ampere develops Renault Group’s software-defined vehicle based on large Android Automotive OS (AAOS) codebases. But like all software companies, it struggled to contain costs, sync code bases, maintain adequate testing regimens, and onboard new talent. 

Building on the existing partnership between Google Cloud and Renault Group, Ampere chose a Google Cloud solution for its software-defined vehicle development. This solution, leveraging Google Cloud Workstations and Gemini Code Assist, effectively streamlined the process, making it more secure and productive by eliminating many common development hurdles.

For security-conscious enterprises, Cloud Workstations offer fully managed development environments. Concurrently, Gemini Code Assist, driven by Gemini 2.5, provides secure generative AI coding assistance and agents across the entire software development lifecycle. And by utilizing Google’s virtual twin technology, specifically developed for AAOS, Ampere constructed  full digital counterparts to their automobiles. 

Let’s take a closer look at the components in this solution:

Google Cloud Workstations

Google Cloud Workstations significantly boosts Android Open Source Project (AOSP) developer productivity in general. In the context of Ampere, it offers on-demand development environments with persistent disks, pre-synced with the customer’s AAOS repositories. This eliminates lengthy sync and build times, allowing developers to access their work from anywhere. Ampere’s Platform Admins provision these workstations, drastically cutting down the time it takes for developers to become productive. Developers have instant access to powerful virtual machines with ample vCPUs, RAM, and fast SSD storage — important for the demanding emulators that they use. This resource elasticity prevents bottlenecks and accelerates development. Then, secure, authenticated cloud access and Google Cloud security tools helps to significantly reduce IP leaks and unauthorized access. Finally, having a consistent development environment prevents “works on my machine” problems and reduces debugging time. The  flexible access and disk configurations enhance AAOS developers’ productivity by enabling workstation access from anywhere, and preserving codebases, configurations, and build artifacts across sessions via persistent disks, eliminating repeated repo syncs.

Gemini Code Assist for AI-powered Android development

To help, Ampere offered their developers Android Studio and Code OSS IDEs integrated with Gemini Code Assist, helping to address code management complexity, reduce steep learning curves, and prevent errors. Gemini Code Assist uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to access Ampere’s private codebases and documentation, providing relevant and accurate code suggestions tailored to their Android development standards and conventions. It sped up understanding of their vast codebases by explaining functions, summarizing modules, and suggesting next steps, benefiting new developers and those working on different parts of the SDV software. It also helped boost their Android development productivity by automating boilerplate code, suggesting APIs, and finding potential problems, letting developers concentrate on core SDV logic instead of repetitive tasks.

The virtual twin 

Google Cloud enabled Ampere’s AAOS developers and testers to use a “virtual twin” of a car, resolving resource and complexity issues associated with physical or poorly managed virtual testing. Developers can use powerful Compute Engine instances and specialized Android emulators like Cuttlefish to create accurate virtual vehicle embedded systems. This enables rigorous software testing with virtual hardware, helping to ensure robust performance before building physical prototypes. AAOS developers can also use scalable virtual devices for parallel testing, comprehensive regression suites, and simulations, accelerating the “test” phase of the CI/CD pipeline and improving the SDV lifecycle. The virtual twin is integrated with the Cloud Workstations development environment and the customer’s CI/CD pipelines (e.g., powered by GKE and GitLab), allowing developers to build their AAOS changes on their workstation, trigger automated tests on a fleet of virtual twins, and get immediate feedback on their code.

Tangible returns of modernized SDV development

By combining the robust, managed infrastructure of Cloud Workstations, Gemini Code Assist’s intelligent assistance, and virtual twins, Google Cloud is helping Renault modernize automotive software development, accelerate innovation, and bring new features to market at unprecedented speeds.

“…to invest and build the software platform for the software defined vehicle in Europe ..you need the tools and this is where Google shines …  At the heart of it is AI and when we talk about code generation, instantiation of things that you need to be running immediately versus waiting for the thing to compile and having be available to the developer …  to make our engineers more efficient so we can do more with less time because we are challenged with time.”  – Henry Bzeih, Ampere Chief Software Officer (Renault Group)

Google Cloud and Gemini Code Assist offer automotive OEMs a transformational shift, extending beyond mere tool adoption to significantly impacting business results. This transition enhances competitiveness, profitability, and innovation speed.

Traditionally, onboarding new developers takes days and is costly. AAOS development often involves time-consuming setup, dependency management, and build system troubleshooting. By reducing environment setup time from days to minutes — including repository syncing and toolchain configuration — and utilizing AI assistance, the development process is vastly accelerated.

OEMs worry about intellectual property leaks from local devices. Cloud Workstations addresses this concern by operating within the customer’s Virtual Private Cloud. This approach prevents source code from being synced locally and exposed on endpoints, reducing security risks.

While cloud infrastructure has associated costs, it yields substantial cost optimization. Eliminating high-end local machines, minimizing wasted developer time on environment management, and speeding up timelines all lower total development costs. The ability to quickly adjust cloud resources ensures payment only for active usage, avoiding idle hardware expenses, and a better return on engineering investment.

Finally, having a virtual twin of the car improves quality assurance and validation. Instead of relying on limited prototypes or unreliable local emulators, developers can use detailed virtual car models, facilitating faster iteration, scalable testing, early bug detection, and advanced scenario simulation.

Automotive companies are not only adopting new technologies but are also reshaping their development capabilities by utilizing Cloud Workstations and Gemini Code Assist. For more, watch the fireside chat with Henry Bzeih, Ampere Chief Software Officer (Renault Group) on their success with this SDV Industry solution.

And if you’re in the automotive industry, you can get started on setting up custom AAOS development environments with Gemini Code Assist by referring to our GitHub repository. And of course,  your Google Partner Engineering or Customer Engineering contacts are ready to help!