Network coding is a promising technique for data communications in wired and wireless networks. However, it places an additional computing overhead on the receiving node in exchange for the improved bandwidth. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable and parallelized network coding decoder for embedded systems especially for vehicular ad hoc networks. In our design, rapid decoding process can be achieved by exploiting parallelism in the coefficient vector operations. The proposed decoder is implemented by using a modern Xilinx Virtex-5 device and its performance is evaluated considering the performance of the software decoding on various embedded processors. The performance on four different sizes of the coefficient matrix is measured and the decoding throughput of 18.3 Mbps for the size 16 × 16 and 6.5 Mbps for 128 × 128 has been achieved at the operating frequency of 64.5 MHz. Compared to the recent TEGRA 250 processor, the result obtained with128 × 128 coefficient matrix reaches up to 5.06 in terms of speedup.