Privacy Statement

For the purposes of data protection laws, Volkswagen Group United Kingdom Limited is a ‘controller’ of your personal information which means Volkswagen Group United Kingdom Limited decides why and how it is processed.  It also means we are responsible for that processing, which extends to those of our subcontractors who process your information based on our instructions.

We work with other, more independent organisations in connection with some of the processing activities described in this statement, such as social media platforms, authorised dealers, and our group companies.  Where that information is collected and sent to other organisations for processing that is in both our and their interests, or where we make decisions together in relation to the processing, we will be ‘joint controllers’ with the organisations involved. As joint controllers, we and the other organisations involved in making these decisions will be jointly responsible to you under data protection laws for this processing.  Please see the relevant privacy statement below relating to organisations with whom we are joint controllers:

• Joint privacy statement with our authorised dealers relating to enquiries and expressions of interest we receive, including where your vehicle or your interactions indicate you would like to be contacted by those dealers
• Joint privacy statement with Volkswagen Financial Services relating to its follow up activities to renew your finance contract
• Joint privacy statements with social media companies relating to processing of your information for marketing and insight related activities (see ‘How do we share this information?’ below)

Where relevant, our Cookie Policy will also describe the processing of any information we receive through the use of cookies on our website for which we are a joint controller with another organisation. 

In other circumstances, the organisation receiving your information will be separately responsible to you and use your personal information in the ways described in its privacy statement (and not ours).

You will always have the option not to receive marketing communications from us. We will never send you unsolicited ‘junk’ email or communications or share your data with anyone else who might. We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with our authorised dealers and repairers, Volkswagen Financial Services and selected partners who help us to provide you with the information, products and services that you request from us, for example, the AA, who provides roadside assistance on our behalf or energy companies in connection with vehicle charging services. 

The contents of this statement may change from time to time so you may wish to check this page occasionally to ensure you are still happy to share your information with us. Where possible, we will also contact you directly to notify you of any substantial changes.

This version of our Privacy Statement is live from April 2026. 

We collect information about you and your vehicle when you engage with or use our website, social media pages, applications, or customer services centre including when you place an online order to purchase a vehicle.  We also receive such information from third party sources including our group companies, data providers, and our authorised dealer network. We only collect information that is necessary, relevant, and adequate for the purpose you are providing it for. 

We also obtain information about you or your vehicle (including your vehicle key) from our authorised dealers and repairers, Volkswagen Financial Services and other companies who provide services to us, such as external agencies, consultants, and IT providers. Some of this information does not identify you personally but provides us with information about how you use our services and engage with us (we use this information to improve our services and make them more useful to you).  The information we collect includes some or all the following:

1.   Name (including title);

2.   Address;

3.   Phone number;

4.   Date of birth;

5.   Email address;

6.   Vehicle information (including registration number, vehicle identification number (VIN), service reminders, mileage, and warranty repair information);

7.   The date and time you used our services; 

8.   The pages you visited on our website, the features you used and how long you visited us for;

9.   Your IP address;

10.   Your GPS location (where you have permitted access to this);

11.   The internet browser and devices you are using;

12.   Cookie, Pixels or Beacon information (for more information please see our  Cookie Policy);

13.   The website address from which you accessed our website;

14.   Details of any transactions between you and us or our authorised dealers, including in relation to your vehicle order and related transactions (for example, reservations and deposit payments, returns, vehicle finance and roadside assistance and contract renewals);

15. Details of any part exchange transactions including settlement amounts; 

16. Vehicle delivery and collection information relating to your orders;

17.   Where you engage with us in a business context, we may collect your job title, company contact details (including email addresses), fleet size, and company details (some of which we may obtain from online or public business directories, including social media);

18.   Voice recordings of calls you make to our customer service centre;

19. Video and audio recordings of your image and voice by way of footage at events we and our commercial partners organise;

20.   “Live chat” records;

21.   Any information within correspondence you send to us including in any competition entries you submit;

22. Your social media name and identification number, any information you post on our social media pages, posts in which you include a hashtag or mention relating to us and information regarding your activities on our social media pages generally (for example, the time and date of your posts and your ‘likes’);

23.  Your direct marketing preferences; 

24.  Details of services provided by our group companies or authorised dealers that you have received or for which you have registered;

25.  Information we receive about you from data cleansing, enrichment and other data providers such as Experian Ltd, Sky UK Ltd and Auto Network (GB) Ltd trading as The Lead Agency including information about your age, income, life stage, location, financial, shopping and digital attitudes, household composition, company directorships, likelihood of owning a motor vehicle, vehicle ownership, current address;

26.   Where you act on behalf of a business, any information we collect as part of business telemarketing activity;

27.   Where your vehicle is financed by Volkswagen Financial Services, we may collect basic agreement information (agreement end date, parity date, service plan details, extended warranty information, and finance agreement length);

28.  Where you sign up to single login, connected vehicle and other services provided by the manufacturer of your vehicle (who is a company in our group), we may receive information about your account, profile, or vehicle, including usage information; and

29. Information about your insurance policies relating to your vehicle, including the type, level, and period of cover.

We obtain personal information directly from you. We may also obtain the following personal information about you from the following sources: 

• The manufacturer of your vehicle, your finance provider, and other companies in our corporate group (see further ‘How do we share this information?’ for details of these companies);
  
• Our authorised dealers;
  
• Insurance companies and brokers, including U K Insurance Limited and its group companies;
  
• Third party reward schemes;
  
• The DVLA;
  
• Social media platforms and business directories;
  
• Experian Ltd, Sky UK Ltd and Auto Network (GB) Ltd trading as The Lead Agency in connection with data enrichment;
  
• Events companies and organisers and commercial partners e.g. festivals
  
• Other commercial partners e.g. e-commerce websites such Amazon
  
• Police and other law enforcement bodies, courts, and legal and professional service providers;
  
• Unsolicited communications; and
  
• Your employer or the company that has engaged you to provide services. 

Any personal information that we obtain from you directly is provided to us on a voluntary basis.  However, if you do not give this information to us, you may be unable to place an order for a vehicle, receive certain services from us or our partners, or communicate with us effectively.

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles UK will only process information that is necessary for the purpose for which it has been collected. You will always have the option not to receive marketing communications from us (and you can withdraw your consent or object at any time). We will never send you unsolicited ‘junk’ email or communications or share your personal information with anyone else who might.

There are various ways in which we may use or process your personal information.  We list these below:

Consent 

Where you have provided your consent, we may use and process your information:

1.   To contact you from time to time about promotions, events, products, services, or information which we think may be of interest to you (don’t worry, we won’t bombard you); 

2.   To share your personal information with our recommended third party partners, so that they can contact you with marketing information about their products and services (we will, of course, give you details about these third parties before you give your permission for us to send information to them).

3.  Where the manufacturer of your vehicle has obtained your consent on our behalf: 

• To undertake market analysis and research; and
• To use mathematical and statistical methods to create information and offers customised for you based on your information, including by making predictions about your behaviour. 
  

We rely on our legitimate interests as the legal reason to use your information for these purposes if we collect your information from another source.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us on the details here or, in relation to any marketing messages you receive, by using the unsubscribe option included in those messages. 

We also process personal information we obtain from optional cookies that we set on this website based on your consent.  For more information, please review our  Cookie Policy.

Contractual performance

We may use and process your personal information where this is necessary to perform a contract with you and to fulfil and complete your orders, purchases and other transactions entered into with us (or one of our authorised dealers or selected partners). This includes the processing of your personal information necessary to: 

• process your order online and deliver your vehicle;
• facilitate the maintenance of your vehicle or diagnosis of faults by our authorised dealers or selected partners, including by accessing information from your vehicle or your vehicle key; 
• administer competitions and promotions that you enter from time to time, and distribute prizes, in accordance with the relevant terms and conditions, including any personal information in any competition entries you submit; and
• send information to you for you to redeem or access gifts, benefits or rewards (including software applications and redemption codes) where these come with or help to operate or unlock features of your vehicle and they have been promised to you in or before entering into the contract.

We may also use and process your personal information in connection with steps you ask us to perform before entering into a contract, for example, where you ask us to prepare and send a quotation to you.

Legitimate Interests 

We may use and process your personal information as set out below where it is necessary for us to carry out activities for which it is in our legitimate interests as a business to do so.

Processing necessary for us to support customers with sales and other enquiries 

1.   To respond to correspondence you send to us and fulfil the requests you make to us (for example: test drives, service requests, brochure requests, or information about specific vehicles);

2.   To provide vehicle support and services (for example warranty services); 

3.   To provide service, maintenance and warranty information and reminders including operating instructions and guides, unless you object;

Processing necessary for us to respond to understanding customers’ and drivers’ needs 

4.   To analyse, evaluate and improve our products and services so that your visit and use of our website, applications, customer service centre and dealer network are more useful and enjoyable (we will generally use data amalgamated from many people so that it doesn’t identify you personally);

5.   To undertake market analysis and research (including contacting you with customer surveys) so that we can better understand you as a customer and provide tailored offers, products, and services that we think you will be interested in.  We will only send such offers to you if you have provided your consent for us to do so; 

6.   For product development purposes (for example to improve vehicle quality, performance, and safety);

7.   We use automated methods to analyse, combine and evaluate information that you have provided to us (including by using information we receive from third party data providers and by receiving and sharing your personal information within our group of companies like Volkswagen Financial Services), see details about our relevant group companies under ‘How do we share this information?’ below. 

We collect and analyse this information in this way so that we can deliver the most appropriate customer experience to you by tailoring and making relevant all our services and communications, including by making predictions about your current or future needs or interests (for example, when you might be ready to change your vehicle and the models you may be interested in);

Processing necessary for us to promote our business, brands and products and measure the reach and effectiveness of our campaigns 

8.   To contact you from time to time with marketing information after you have purchased a product or service from us, made a purchasing enquiry, or requested a test drive, brochure, or other information of interest. We will only contact you with information about our own products and services (and in ways the law allows), which we hope you will like. You have the right to object to us sending you this information at any time;

9.   To contact you from time to time with marketing information (unless you object) if you have expressly indicated to us that you are acting on behalf of a corporate business or where we have obtained your corporate business contact details from our authorised dealer network or an online or public business directory. In relation to any such information we send by email or SMS, we will include an option allowing you to object to receiving future messages by unsubscribing; 

10.  To tailor the marketing information we send based on information we hold about you (e.g. by sending offers and information based on a vehicle you own) or based on your interactions with our online vehicle configurator.

11.  To use mathematical and statistical methods to create information and offers customised for you based on your information, including by making predictions about your behaviour and your and your vehicle’s needs.  This may include predicting your preferences, when your vehicle may need its next service, your likelihood of making another purchase, your loyalty to a vehicle brand or model as well as making suitable product recommendations tailored to you. 

12.   To contact you with targeted advertising delivered online through social media, search engines, third party websites and applications and other platforms operated by other companies, such as Google, unless you object.  You may receive advertising based on information about you that we have provided to the platform, matched with information it already holds about you or allowed it to collect using cookies on our website or code in our applications (or a combination of the two).  You may also receive advertising because, at our request, the platform has identified you as falling within a group whose attributes we have selected or a group that has similar attributes to the individuals whose details it has received from us (or a combination of the two). We, or an agency acting on our behalf, may also ask platforms to display our advertisements to groups of people with certain interests or attributes and those platforms may use information that they have collected from you directly, independently of any request from us. In these cases, we may never receive that information or know that our advertisement has been seen by you specifically.  The information used to display an advertisement to you online may also be used to avoid displaying an advertisement (for example, to avoid showing you an advert for a product you have already purchased).  You may see our advertisements in your social media feed or when you use search engines, view videos or visit other websites.  To find out more, please refer to the information provided in the help pages of the platforms on which you receive advertising from us.  Please also see the section below for further information regarding our use of social media platforms specifically;

13.   To identify and record when you have received, opened, or engaged with our website or electronic communications (please see our Cookie Policy for more information); 

14.   To create advertising and other promotional material to publicise our brands and products in marketing campaigns;

15.   To send you information on our extended warranty products where you are benefiting from a current vehicle warranty and it is about to expire. You have the right to object to us sending this information at any time; 

16.  To identify the extent to which your interactions and communications with us or our content contributed to your engagement with us or our brand;

Processing necessary for us to communicate with you and to assess and respond to complaints, claims, and regulators 

17.   To communicate with you (including through social media) including to respond to queries, complaints or claims and to manage legal and regulatory requests and requirements;

18.   To enforce or protect our legal rights or to establish, bring or defend legal claims; 

Processing necessary for us to operate the administrative and technical aspects of our business efficiently and effectively

19.   To verify the accuracy of information that we hold about you and create a better understanding of you as a customer.  We may use information about you from third party data providers for this purpose, including data cleansing service providers that provide the latest home address or vehicle ownership information for you; 

20.   For network and information security purposes i.e. in order for us to take steps to protect your information against loss, damage, theft, or unauthorised access;

21. To maintain the security of our staff, customers, venues, systems, premises, or property and to investigate any actual, suspected or threatened breach of that security; 

22.  To support our compliance with a request from you in connection with the exercise of your rights (for example where you have asked us not to contact you for marketing purposes, we will keep a record of this on our suppression lists in order to be able to comply with your request);

23.  To facilitate the processing of payments made by you to us; 

24.  To administer our websites, applications, social media pages and accounts and our products, and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, testing, training, and statistical purposes;

25.  For cookies that are essential for our websites to function properly (please see our Cookie Policy for more information); 

26.  For the purposes of corporate restructure or reorganisation or sale or purchase of businesses or assets;

27. For efficiency, accuracy or other improvements of our products, services, business processes, databases, and systems, for example, by combining systems or consolidating records we hold about you; 

28.  To inform you of updates to our terms and conditions and policies;

29.  To contact you when your local authorised dealer opens, closes, moves premises or is no longer an authorised dealer.

30.  To aggregate or otherwise anonymise your information, and to permit our service providers to do the same, for our or those providers’ use of the anonymised information for operational, administrative, or business improvement purposes. 

31. To train, fine-tune, develop and test models which power the artificial intelligence technology we use within our business and in some of our services. For more information, please see the section ‘Our use of artificial intelligence’.

Legal Obligation 

We may process your personal information to comply with our legal or regulatory requirements (for example to register your car with the DVLA, to assist, or respond to a request for information from, an authorised authority, regulatory body or court, or to respond to a court order).  These requirements include processing to remember your cookie consent preferences for optional cookies used by our website. Please see our Cookie Policy for further information.

Vital Interest 

Sometimes we will need to process your personal information to contact you if there is an urgent safety or product recall notice and we need to tell you about it.

Our use of artificial intelligence

We use artificial intelligence, commonly known as ‘AI’, in a variety of ways within our business. AI enables computers to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as recognising patterns, understanding language (e.g. to provide replies to questions), or making predictions based on information, including in certain cases, your personal information. 

How do we use AI

Some of our uses of AI allow us to provide improved or ‘AI-powered’ versions of our existing services as well developing new ones, including those relating to our websites, applications, customer service centre, and dealer network. Others allow us to put AI to use in the background, helping our business to operate more efficiently and effectively. This means that we may use AI in connection with any of the purposes and types of information mentioned in this privacy statement, all focussed on making sure you have the best possible experience with us.  

Examples of how we may use AI include: 

1. Online chat: this feature is included in some of our websites and is designed to assist you by responding to your queries e.g. in relation to new products.

2. Personalisation: certain content in our website, applications and emails may be personalised for you using AI. Where the law requires us to obtain your consent to do so, we will always request this before personalising content for you.

3. Surveys: we may use AI to help analyse the responses you provide to us when completing customer surveys.

AI-powered features and other services 

When you are interacting with features on our websites or other directly accessible services that use AI, we will always aim to make this clear to you as we want you to be informed and feel comfortable when using this new technology. 

One common type of AI that we may use on our website is ‘generative AI’. This is often used in AI features that invite you to provide information to us (such as a question about a product in an online chat window) and providing a response generated by AI based on detailed background information that the AI feature has access to. The AI is able to do this because it learns to spot patterns in lots of material on which it was trained, for example, patterns in how people write text. The AI guesses the next words in a sentence to give answers that sound natural and helpful. 

Depending on the feature, you may be asked not to provide any personal information about yourself or others. The information that you receive in a response may include text, images, or videos, depending on the feature you use. Please see the instructions that accompany the AI feature for more information.

Use of information to train AI models 

The AI features we use have often been ‘pre-trained’ by other companies or by us (or both) to improve the way they operate. In some cases, we may use your personal information to train models that power the AI features you interact with, and in some cases, the AI tools we use in the background. When we refer to ‘training’, this includes fine-tuning, testing, enhancing, or carrying out a similar activity designed at developing or improving the AI we use or the underlying model that helps it produce a result.

We will never use your sensitive information (such has health data or criminal conviction information) for training any AI models.  

The safeguards we apply when using AI

We take steps, including by carrying out risk assessments and implementing security measures, to ensure we use AI in ways that are responsible, fair, and secure. This includes, where appropriate, limiting access to your information, anonymising information, preventing any training based on your information, and monitoring AI outputs for accuracy and bias. 

Automated decision making

We do not make any significant automated decisions about you using AI. Please see further ‘How can I manage the information you hold about me?’ 

We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with our dealer network, Volkswagen Financial Services, our group companies and with third party suppliers who fulfil business activities for us (like roadside assistance, marketing, events, social media platforms and market research etc.)

Service providers

We do not sell your information to third parties. However, we may from time to time disclose your information to the following categories of companies or organisations to which we pass the responsibility to handle services on our behalf: roadside assistance service providers, customer contact centres, mobility and car hire providers, hosting providers, data cleansing and verification providers, providers of artificial intelligence technology including models and related services, direct marketing communications agencies and consultants, market research and market analytics service providers, our legal and other professional advisors. 

Dealers

 We will also share your information with our dealer network in situations where we need to pass your information to them in order to manage any request, provide a service (including to fulfil and manage your orders) or handle any complaint you may have made to us. For example, where you have requested a test drive, we will need to share your personal information with your selected dealer so that they can contact you to arrange for the test drive to take place. 

Sharing for legal reasons

We will also share your personal information if we have a duty to do so, e.g. to register your car with the DVLA, to assist an authorised authority, regulatory body, or court, or to enforce or protect our legal rights or to establish, bring or defend legal claims. 

Group companies

There are also circumstances where we share your information with our parent (or other companies within our Group) in order to understand you as a customer, fulfil orders, transactions, handle complaints or provide you with a service or information that you have requested. For example, we will share information with Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited where you enquire about their services through us or where you make a complaint to us and later make the same or similar complaint to them. Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited may use your information to provide you with information and carry out their obligations arising from contracts you enter into with them.   

The relevant group companies with whom we share information are listed below. Please click the name of the company to see its privacy statement.

• Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited
• Volkswagen AG
• Audi AG
  
• SEAT S.A.
• SEAT CUPRA, S.A.U.

We use a number of different social media platforms to communicate with you and to promote products and services. We process your personal information using these platforms in a variety of ways, as follows: 

Pages

We use your personal information when you post content or otherwise interact with us on our official pages on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and other social media platforms.   We also use the Page Insights service for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to view statistical information and reports regarding your interactions with the pages we administer on those platforms and their content.  Where those interactions are recorded and form part of the information we access through these Page Insights services, we and the relevant platform are joint controllers of the processing necessary to provide that service to us. 

Cookies

We use cookies and similar technologies in our websites and applications to collect and send information to Facebook and LinkedIn about actions you take on our website and applications.  In particular: 

Meta (who operates the Facebook and Instagram platforms) uses this information to provide services to us and also for further processing for its own business purposes. We and Meta are joint data controllers of the processing involved in collecting and sending your personal information to Meta using cookies and similar technologies as each of us has a business interest in Meta receiving this information.  You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookies Policy.  The services we receive from Meta that use this information are delivered to us through Meta Business Tools, which include Meta Pixel, Social Plugins, App Events SDK and Website Custom Audiences. These tools allow us to target advertising to you within Meta’s social media platforms by creating audiences based on your actions on our Website and allow Meta to improve and optimise the targeting and delivery of our advertising campaigns for us.

We use LinkedIn Insight Tag, a small piece of code that we embed in our websites that allows us to perform in-depth campaign reporting and unlock insights about users that may visit our websites via our LinkedIn campaigns (e.g. by allowing us to discover business demographics by layering LinkedIn data on data about our website visitors).  LinkedIn Insight Tag enables the collection of metadata such as IP addresses, timestamps, and events such as page views.  You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy. 

Our relationship with Meta and LinkedIn

As we are joint data controllers with these platforms for certain processing, we and each platform have: 

• entered into agreements in which we have agreed each of our data protection responsibilities for the processing of your personal information described above;
• agreed that we are responsible for providing to you the information in this privacy notice about our relationship with each platform; and 
• agreed that each platform is responsible for responding to you when you exercise your rights under data protection law in relation to that platform’s processing of your personal information as a joint data controller.

Meta and LinkedIn also process, as our processor, contact information that we submit for the purposes of matching, online targeting, measurement, reporting, and analytics purposes. These services include the processing these platforms carry out when they display our advertisements to you in your news feed at our request after matching contact details for you that we have uploaded to the social media platforms they operate.  These advertisements may include forms through which we collect contact information you give to us. 

Further information

The Meta company that is a joint data controller of your personal information is Meta Platforms, Inc., 1601 Willow Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA (if you are a UK-registered user) or Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, Block J, Serpentine Avenue, Dublin 4, Ireland (if you are an EEA-registered user). The LinkedIn company that is a joint data controller of your personal information is LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, Ireland. For further information regarding these platforms and their use of your personal information, please see: 

Meta’s Controller Addendum for Page Insights and UK Controller Addendum for Business Tools (for users located in the UK) and Controller Addendum (for users located in the EEA), and LinkedIn’s Page Insights Joint Controller  Addendum, which include information which include information regarding how our and these platforms’ responsibilities to you are allocated as controllers of your personal information;

Meta’s Privacy Center including its Privacy Policy at https://www.facebook.com/privacy and LinkedIn’s Privacy Policy which include details of the legal reasons (known as ‘lawful bases’) on which each platform relies to process your personal information, together with details regarding your data protection rights 

Meta’s help pages regarding its Page Insights and Business Tools and its terms and conditions relating to those tools

LinkedIn’s help pages regarding its Page Insights and its terms and conditions relating to its advertising services, including LinkedIn Insight Tag 

Our relationship with TikTok

To find out more about our relationship with TikTok, please see the terms of the data sharing arrangement we have with TikTok and the TikTok Privacy Policy. 

We may share your personal information with commercial partners with whom we collaborate and with organisations in the wider automotive community that we support. For example, we may share limited information with third party rewards schemes or with vehicle charging and capacity planning organisations to ensure that the infrastructure necessary to allow you to use your vehicle is in place.

Due to the international nature of our business, there may be some instances where your information is processed or stored outside of the UK. Those countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK and so may not protect the use of your personal information to the same standard. In those instances, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Privacy Statement. These steps include imposing contractual obligations on the recipient of your personal information using standard clauses issued by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (or other relevant body) and relying on decisions issued by the relevant UK Secretary of State (or other relevant person) declaring that a recipient or country is adequately protective of personal information to a degree that allows us to safely transfer your personal information to that recipient or country.  This includes any international frameworks that allow recipients to certify that they can receive your personal information safely and process it in a manner that is protected to an equivalent standard as that under UK laws.

Please contact us using the details at the end of this Privacy Statement for more information about the protections that we put in place and to obtain a copy of the relevant documents.

If you use our services whilst you are outside the UK, your information may be transferred outside the UK in order to receive those services. 

Safeguards

We take steps to ensure that any third-party partners who handle your information comply with data protection legislation and protect your information just as we do. We only disclose personal information that is necessary for them to provide the service that they are undertaking on our behalf. We will aim to anonymise your information including using aggregated datasets, wherever possible. 

We will not hold your personal information in an identifiable format for any longer than is necessary. If you are a customer or otherwise have a relationship with us, we will hold personal information about you for a longer period than if we have obtained your details in connection with a prospective relationship. 

We do not retain personal information in an identifiable format for longer than is necessary.

Customer / Driver relationships 

If we have a relationship with you (e.g. you are a customer or the registered driver of a leased or other vehicle purchased from us or an authorised dealer), we hold your personal information for 6 years from the date our relationship ends. We hold your personal information after our relationship ends to establish, bring or defend legal claims and for marketing purposes. For clarity, if you have provided your consent, we will continue to send marketing to you during those 6 years unless you opt-out. Our relationship may end for a number of reasons including where the vehicle warranty or lease expires, or we have been made aware that you no longer own or drive that vehicle.

Prospective relationships 

Where we have obtained your personal information following a request for information, test drive, brochure, quotation or any other information on any of our products or services, we hold your personal information for 1 year and 6 months from the date we collect that information, unless during that period we form a relationship with you e.g. you purchase or lease a vehicle or consent for us to send you marketing information.

Where you have consented to receive marketing, regardless of whether or not we have a prospective relationship with you based on an information request, we will retain information we need to market to you for 3 years and 6 months from the date consent was given (unless you are a customer/driver, for which a longer period applies – see further above). Each time you provide your consent, the time period will refresh. 

We hold your personal information for the above periods to give us an opportunity to form a relationship with you.

Exceptions 

The only exceptions to the periods mentioned above are where:

• The law requires us to hold your personal information for a longer period, or delete it sooner;
  
• Where you have raised a legal claim, complaint or concern regarding a product or service offered by us, in which case we will retain your information for a period of 6 years following the date of that complaint or query; or
  
• You exercise your right to have the information erased (where it applies) and we do not need to hold it in connection with any of the reasons permitted or required under the law (see further ’How can you manage the information we hold about you?’ below);  

You have the right as an individual to access your personal information we hold about you and make corrections if necessary. You also have the right to withdraw any consent you have previously given us and ask us to erase information we hold about you. You can also object to us using your personal information (where we rely on our business interests to process and use your personal information).

You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection law. In relation to most rights, we will ask you for information to confirm your identity and, where applicable, to help us search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 1 month after we have received any request (including any identification documents requested).

You have the right to:

• Ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you;
  
• Correct and update your information;
  
• Withdraw your consent (where we rely on it). Please see further ‘How do we use this information?’ on this page;
  
• Object to our use of your information (for direct marketing, or where we rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information) provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process the information.  When we do rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information for direct marketing, we will always comply with your right to object;
  
• Erase your information (or restrict the use of it), provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process that information;
  
• Transfer your information in a structured data file (in a commonly used and machine-readable format), where we rely on your consent to use and process your personal information or need to process it in connection with your contract.

You also have the right not to be subject to purely automated decisions (including profiling) where this has a significant effect on you. We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you in this way, however we will update this statement if this changes.

You can exercise the above rights and/or manage your information by contacting us using the details below: 

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Customer Services 
PO Box 9004 
LEEDS 
LS1 9WA

Email: customercare@vwcv.co.uk 
Phone: 0800 783 4909

If you have any specific data protection concerns or a complaint, you can address it to our Data Protection Team at dataprotection@vwg.co.uk.

If you are unhappy, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the data protection regulator in the UK.  The contact details for the ICO are below:

Post:    
Information Commissioner's Office 
Wycliffe House 
Water Lane 
Wilmslow 
Cheshire 
SK9 5AF

Email:   casework@ico.org.uk 
Phone:     0303 123 1113