Executive Sedan
3 pax·3 bags
Not a Broker
We employ our own chauffeurs and maintain our own vehicles, so the company you book is the company that shows up.
01
How We Started
Velvet Mile owns the vehicles it drives and employs the people who drive them. That is the whole model, and it runs against how most of this market works: a large share of chauffeured bookings get passed along to whichever independent operator has a car free that day, so the name on the booking page and the business that actually shows up can be two different companies.
We built this the other way around. When you book with us, the chauffeur who arrives works for us directly, and the vehicle is one we maintain ourselves. There is no broker sitting between the booking and the driver, deciding after the fact who actually gets the job.
02
Our Chauffeurs
A chauffeur who drives for Velvet Mile answers to Velvet Mile, not to an app deciding which independent contractor is closest to the pickup. That distinction sounds small until something goes wrong: a late arrival, a scuffed door, a tone on a phone call that wasn't right. In a brokered model, the company you booked has limited leverage over the driver who actually shows up. In ours, the chauffeur is on our schedule, in our vehicle, and answerable to us.
That is what lets a standard mean anything in practice: punctuality, how a call from dispatch gets handled mid-route, the condition a vehicle is returned in at the end of a shift. If a ride falls short of what we set out to do, we hear about it directly and we are the ones who fix it — not a subcontractor with no one specific to call.
03
Our Fleet
The vehicles below are ours. We do not lease a car for the day from a general rental counter and put a chauffeur behind the wheel of whatever is available — every vehicle in this fleet is one we maintain, and the class you are quoted is the vehicle that arrives.
Owning what we drive means a vehicle's condition is our responsibility end to end, not a rental agency's and not a subcontractor's. Each class below is built for a different kind of trip, from a single passenger to a full group; the specifics for each one are listed under it.
Luxury SUV
6 pax·6 bags
Sprinter Van
14 pax·14 bags
Minibus
25 pax·20 bags
Motorcoach
56 pax·56 bags
Stretch Limousine
10 pax·2 bags
Party Bus
30 pax
04
How We Keep Standards
A standard only means something if one company can enforce it end to end. Because we employ our own chauffeurs and own our own vehicles, we are not asking a collection of separate businesses to agree to our rules — we are setting them for people who work for us and vehicles we are responsible for. What follows is what that structure actually lets us hold to.
One Employer, One Standard
Every chauffeur on the road for us works for us directly, so a rule we set applies the same way on every ride, not only the ones handled by a driver who happens to agree with it.
Vehicles We Answer For
A vehicle we own is a vehicle we are accountable for. Its condition does not depend on a rental agency's turnaround or a subcontractor's habits between jobs.
No Subcontractor In Between
If something about a ride needs fixing, you are not routed to a broker who has to track down a contractor days later. You are talking to the company that employed the chauffeur and owns the vehicle.
05
Licensing and Insurance
Operating a chauffeured vehicle legally in California is not optional paperwork on the side — it is a permit structure with real requirements, and we hold ourselves to it as a baseline, not a claim to make. Here is what the state and the airport actually require of an operator in this category.
CPUC Charter-Party Carrier Permit
California requires any charter-party carrier — the legal category a chauffeur service operates under — to hold a TCP permit from the CPUC, with public liability and property damage insurance on file and coverage that scales with a vehicle's seating capacity.
CHP Safety Inspection
Any vehicle seating more than ten passengers, and any modified limousine, requires a CHP safety inspection as part of that same CPUC compliance — a check on the vehicle itself, not only the paperwork behind it.
Airport Ground Transportation Permit
Picking up at the airport takes a separate commercial vehicle permit from the airport's own ground transportation office, on top of the state TCP permit — a second layer that applies only at the curb.
06
Where We Operate
We do not try to cover every corner of the map at once. Where we operate, we do it with our own chauffeurs and our own vehicles, never a partner picked up for a single job. The areas linked below are where that holds true today. If a pickup falls outside them, we will tell you before you book, not after a chauffeur is already circling a street we do not actually serve.