Shark Week has always been one of my favorite television events. I will take any excuse I can get to talk about or watch more of Shark Week. It probably all started because my little brother used to hatch shark eggs in our basement. Yes, I’m being completely serious. My brother has had a pretty serious love of sharks his whole life, a love we now can share, and so he would love telling me all about the sharks he was hatching and then we’d go on a road trip to release them into the ocean. It was kinda a cool experience for the two of us. It helped us to bond as we got older.

So why, you might ask, am I going off on a tangent about Shark Week in a Volkswagen blog? WELL, this year during Shark Week, which is happening right now, Volkswagen, who has been a sponsor of the television event for 6 years now, has introduced Land of Sharks, a different kind of look at the oceans of the past and the sharks that lived there in a cross country journey in the all-new 2018 Volkswagen Atlas!

“The Land of Sharks campaign, developed by Volkswagen’s agency of record Deutsch and produced by Discovery Channel, includes a short video series to tell the story of a family on a road trip in a Volkswagen Atlas as they travel to various locations to learn about prehistoric sharks that once swam there. These three 60-second vignettes will display the family visiting an archeological site, traveling to a research lab and finally driving in an Atlas to dive with modern sharks.”

It’s clear why they chose the all-new 2018 Volkswagen Atlas as the vehicle to make this cross country trek. The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas SEL Premium “fits families of all sizes with its Easy-Access 3rd-row seating for 7, and includes an array of high tech interior features such as the Volkswagen Digital Cockpit with available Volkswagen App-Connect and Fender Premium Audio System. The all-new Atlas is also the only vehicle in its class to offer Automatic Post-Collision Braking System. The Volkswagen Atlas comes with a six-year or 72,000-mile (whichever occurs first) New Vehicle Limited Warranty, with coverage that’s transferable beyond the first owner—the best transferable, bumper-to-bumper warranty among SUVs in America.”

In addition, if you want to check out what sharks lived in your own neighborhood, VW and Discovery Channel put together an interactive page called Land of Sharks which connects to google maps to show the sharks that would have been found in your backyard millions of years ago! This is available from Sunday, July 23, 2017, to Sunday, July 30, 2017, so you still have time to check it out! Fans will be able to access the experience through the Land of Sharks website, http://landofsharks.com/. I’ve been playing around with it for like an hour now and it is awesome! I’ve already learned about a shark called the Helicoprion. This thing has teeth running down the center of its mouth like a table saw. It’s INSANE! Definitely go check it out!

Ltd, Newspress. “VOLKSWAGEN TAKES A BITE OUT OF DISCOVERY CHANNEL’S SHARK WEEK WITH.” Volkswagen Media Centre. N.p., 21 July 2017. Web. 28 July 2017. <http://media.vw.com/release/1414/>.