The inclination of owners to drive their open vehicles themselves carried over into the automobile age, and the black-putteed chauffeur who succeeded the coachman was more or less relegated to the custodianship of closed cars. However, many chauffeurs were completely in charge of a family's transportation requirements, even including purchase of the automobiles. J. P. Morgan never met a representative of Brunn & Company of Buffalo, coachbuilder for his Lincoln chassis. The coachwork operations were handled by Morgan's head chauffeur.

There was some overlapping of chauffeur duties and owner-driving sentiment in the case of the phaetons. Sometimes the chauffeur was brought along on an open car ride, not to drive, but to be a symbol of affluence.

Ralph Stein's handsome volume, Treasury of the Automobile, has an example of this in a large double-spread picture of a young-man-about-town in the early 1920s at the wheel of his solid hardwood Hispano-Suiza phaeton, his Panama hat turned up in front and down in back, cruising the boulevard and eyeing the ladies, with his fully liveried chauffeur sitting at attention in the tonneau.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his novel, "The Great Gatsby," during the heyday of the phaeton, and expressed the feel of this vehicle thus: "...Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat boxes and tool boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green-leather conservatory, we started to town."