Volvo Releases List of Treasure Hunt Finalists

Kevin Anderson
August 4, 2006

The list of the final and selected Volvo XC90 treasure hunters has now been released by Volvo Cars. And how many treasure seekers would be battling it out to dig up the Volvo XC90 for himself? Seven. And these seven come from various parts of the globe.

The Volvo Treasure Hunt was actually in support to the Disney movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”. The whole competition is global and uses multi-media, which is the very first of its kind. Somewhere around the globe, the treasure – a pirate-themed Volvo XC90 powered by a V8 engine – is still buried. And the finalist who would be able to decipher and discover the Volvo XC90 would claim it as his very own. And for those contestants which may be quite down on his luck, who knows? They may even be able to dig up Volvo XC70 parts to bring home.

Three Americans – Jenny Buckalew, David Hutz, and James Hutz – were able to make it to the final seven Volvo treasure hunters. The other treasure seekers hail from Spain, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Japan. Karl Lloyd is British, Jose Luis Dominguez Monge is the Spaniard, Akihiro Horibe is the Japanese pirate, and Susanne Kalintsch is the Austrian treasure seeker. Right now, they are still preparing for the huge adventure that awaits them on August 6. Come that date, Volvo would be flying them to a new location where the final leg of the race would start. However, the location would remain undisclosed until the day of the competition. Sure enough, the last leg would not be a piece of cake.

Anne Belec is the president and CEO for Volvo’s operations in North America. She excitedly exclaims, “We had participants blogging, sharing clues, writing online poems and becoming deeply engaged in the process. We had more than 52,000 participants in the US alone, each of which had to come into a Volvo retailer to pick up a treasure map to begin play, with 25 percent of them opting in for more information about Volvo cars while they played. It has been a wildly entertaining campaign and we are looking forward to seeing who actually finds the Volvo we buried.”