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.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Should You Hire a Chauffeur?

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.