You don’t have to have your car serviced by a main dealer but I did read somewhere that, although you can have it serviced by a independent garage using genuine manufacture’s parts, it must be a VAT registered business. That would obviously rule out most individual owners.
Yes, I can also recall reading this somewhere.
The UK terms and conditions of VW’s new car warranty state the following;
‘Your vehicle should be serviced in accordance with the manufacturer's recommendations. Any damage to or defect in the vehicle caused by poor or insufficient servicing will not be remedied under the vehicle's warranty. Please ensure that you maintain sufficient records to enable our Authorised Network to confirm that the vehicle has been appropriately serviced. In any event, please ensure that the service schedule booklet in your vehicle is stamped by the business carrying out the service work, or detailed invoices supplied with date, mileage, plus specified parts and fluids used’.
The warranty t’s and c’s also exclude ‘Damage or defects caused by not having the vehicle serviced in accordance with the manufacturer's recommendations’.
I’m assuming that ‘servicing in accordance with the manufacturer’s recommendations’ would mean anyone considering self servicing would need to get a copy of VW’s schedule for any servicing and other maintenance jobs (if there are any) that VW recommend should carried out during the warranty period to ensure full compliance with VW’s requirements. Even with a first service - which is essentially an oil and filter change - the VW dealer may carry out other tasks, but what are they? If there are any and they’re not done, then that could be grounds for VW to deny a potential warranty claim.
Also, VW will apply any software updates and service actions that are relevant to a vehicle when they carry out the servicing. Self servicing would mean these wouldn’t get applied.
I personally wouldn’t have an issue using a reputable VAT registered independent VW specialist for servicing a car under warranty. They may not have access to VW digital service records to update the car’s service history, so it would be really important to keep all invoices and receipts of work carried out, so if there was a potential warranty claim, the risk of it being denied by VW is minimised. Also, any receipts for work done would need to be detailed enough to show the work carried out, details of parts and fluids (VW part no’s and VW spec details as proof of the correct parts / fluids being used) again, to minimise the risk of a warranty claim being denied.
Link to VWUK new car warranty terms and conditions below;
https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/owners-and-drivers/my-car/warranties/new-car-terms.html