Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are flavor of mobile ad hoc networks. With the increase in the development of mobile technology in the last decade or so, we see increased interest in the development in VANET protocols as well. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol that uses predictive position information of neighboring nodes for data dissemination. The highly dynamic topology of VANET results in route discovered by a routing protocol to be intermittent. Hence, in this work we propose a predictive flooding in VANET (PFV) which has a flavor of flooding protocol for data transfer. Our results show that the PFV considerably reduces the network load in terms of forwards with an increase in the performance of data dissemination as well. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2021.