Should You Hire a Chauffeur?

Jay Leno once spoke of flipping through the owner’s manual of a vintage luxury car he owns, and coming upon a somewhat dated reference. It said to have “your man” perform regular maintenance. The man was the chauffeur, and it was assumed this uniformed functionary was on hand both to drive the car and keep it in top condition.

These duties make sense, given the history. The word “chauffeur” is of French origins, dating to 1896 or so, and is derived from the term for the “stoker,” who shovelled the fuel and took the helm of early steamships and trains. The best cars early on came from France, and hence the word was imported along with the cars.

Obviously, cars in the early part of the 20th century required considerable maintenance, and it was the chauffeur who hopped out to fix the frequent punctures or crank the engine. This fellow worked for a single boss and was an essential part of the domestic staff. The drivers even had their own magazine in Britain, The Chauffeur, which was published from 1907 to 1914.

In the hit BBC series Downton Abbey , the fiery Socialist chauffeur, Tom Branson (played by Allen Leach) marries Lady Sybil Crawley, joins the family circle, and becomes the esteemed estate manager. This would have shattered social conventions at the time, and is somewhat unlikely. The best that most chauffeurs could expect was to be gifted the car at retirement.

Classic chauffeur-driven limousines of the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes called “sedanca de ville” (town car), had enclosed compartments with cloth seats for the passengers and an open leather-clad driver’s area, possibly a vestige of the carriage trade, when the driver sat up top to control the horses.

The chauffeur had a renaissance during the go-go greed-is-good 1980s, when Wall Street’s instant millionaires were making deals in the back of limousines. But since that time, the limos from companies like Cadillac and Lincoln have gone out of production. According to Gregg Merksamer, editor of website Professional Car Society, “The recent action has moved to upfitting minibuses like the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter and the Ford Transit with more luxurious interiors. One reason is that bus-based limos come with more headroom and ‘walk-around space’ than an SUV-based stretch.”

Ohio’s Chris Axelrod with his 1956 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 75 limousine.
Gregg D. Merksamer, Professional Car Society

Lincoln Continentals like this one were stretched into chauffeur-driven limousines by Lehmann-Peterson of Chicago in the 1960s.
Gregg D. Merksamer, Professional Car Society

Hiring a Driver

Many executives are now driving themselves, but hiring a driver is still an attractive option. The role of chauffeur is evolving. The basic categories for hired drivers are:

Personal drivers, who typically drive regular cars and help out as needed. Indeed.com says a common salary for a personal driver is $15.44 per hour, though this ranges up to $31.70. The jobs are competitive, the site says—with 25 applicants for every job.

Executive drivers, whose passengers are business executives and CEOs, are often authorised to bring their vehicles into restricted areas. This is a higher-paid category, with salaries up to $93,000 a year, or $45 an hour.

Chauffeurs (with female professionals known formally as a “chauffeuse”). For VIP clients these full-time drivers pilot long-wheelbase luxury vehicles, sometimes with divider windows and communications systems. Chauffeurs might make $50,000 a year in relatively affluent areas.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics combines salaries for shuttle drivers and chauffeurs, giving a median annual salary in 2023 of $35,240. In the larger category that includes taxi drivers, there are 55,400 job openings annually in the U.S. The average chauffeur is male (84%) and white (52%), though 23.8% are Hispanic and 8.7% African-American. Female chauffeurs make approximately $5,000 less annually, according to Zippia.com.

So, does hiring a full-time chauffeur make sense? It does if you lead a busy work life, stress over getting the kids to school on time, worry about possible accidents, or want to make more productive use of your travel time.

To make such a hire, start by deciding whether you want to use an agency or recruit someone yourself from online sites. Then list all the tasks you will want the chauffeur to undertake. That will help determine your driver’s hours, leading possibly to the conclusion that part-time help will be sufficient. Even if you’re using an agency, you’ll want to check the potential hire’s references—remember, they’re likely to be driving children.

Assuming the references check out, the next step is an interview to get to know the candidate. The basics are a full resume, a valid driver’s license, appropriate insurance coverage, and sometimes mechanical skills and a knowledge of defensive-driving tactics.

Personality and temperament are important factors, not just paper credentials. And a probationary period to evaluate the chauffeur where the rubber meets the road is an excellent idea. Salary should be determined based on years of experience.

Which Car?

Excellent candidates for chauffeured cars, ensuring the most passenger comfort, include:

2024 Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 SUV ($174,350). The chauffeur of 40 years ago would have been amazed at the choice of an SUV for chauffeur duty, but these cars maximise passenger access and space.

2024 Audi A8L (starting at $90,900). Check the boxes on this roomy company flagship for Comfort Plus (dual-pane acoustic glass, heated rear seats) and Black Optic Plus (for incognito travel). For a European customer circa 2016, Audi created the 20.9-foot-long Audi A8L Extended, with a 166-inch wheelbase and six doors. All six passengers got seating equivalent to first-class airplane travel.

2024 Rolls-Royce Phantom Extended ($573,000). This car’s interior, the company says, is “a sumptuous sanctuary, where escapism is the main objective.” A high degree of customisation is possible. Gerry Spahn, who heads Rolls-Royce communications in the U.S., said that the Phantom is “the ultimate palette for Rolls-Royce Bespoke, allowing clients to incorporate their personal lifestyle into the interior design through materials, finishes, and new technology.”

2024 Cadillac Celestiq ($340,000). Cadillac was once the standard for the chauffeured limousine. This one is a luxurious way of going green, and an out-of-the-box choice for a chauffeured vehicle. It doesn’t look like any other vehicle on the road; AutoExtremist dubbed the Celestiq “a singular design triumph.” These hand-built electric sedans are being produced in very small numbers. All four passengers sit on 20-way adjustable heated, vented, and cooled seats with massage, and enjoy personal screens.

Cadillac limousines, like this 1966 model, were once standard for chauffeur service, but these days refitted Sprinter vans are taking over.
Gregg D. Merksamer, Professional Car Society

Cabot Coach’s custom mobile office is for executive travel.
Cabot Coach

And you can go custom. Companies such as Cabot Coach in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and Executive Coach Builders in Springfield, Missouri, will craft a bespoke limousine to your specifications. Steve Edelmann, director of sales at Cabot Coach, said that for $200,000 to $300,000 his company will outfit an SUV or Sprinter van as a fully equipped mobile office for executive customers, sometimes—shades of the 1930s—with a partition for privacy from the driver.

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2024 Issue of Mansion Global Experience Luxury.

What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.

Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.

Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.

We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.

Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.

A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.

However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.

So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.

Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.

Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.

No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)

Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.

This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.

“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.

Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.

And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.

Get physical

So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.

There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.

Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.

“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”

Use AI, but not too much

Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.

“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.

In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.

This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.

Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.

Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.

Should You Hire a Chauffeur?

As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Get physical

Use AI, but not too much