Should You Hire a Chauffeur?
5 min
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.”
Gregg D. Merksamer, Professional Car Society
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.
Gregg D. Merksamer, Professional Car Society
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.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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