DeSoto, SF's oldest taxi firm, ditches 82-year old name for Flywheel, as part of co-marketing agreement with e-hailing app company
Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle :
Context & Ripple Effects
DeSoto's rebrand is the moment a legacy fleet stops treating its name as an asset and starts treating software distribution as one: the TaxiOS app Flywheel was piloting later that year replaces meters, payment, navigation, and dispatch on driver phones, so a taxi company's identity matters less than its seat on the platform. The move lands amid pressure from e-hailing rivals — within a year, Yellow Cab, the city's largest taxi company, was edging toward bankruptcy.
The bet aged into consolidation rather than rescue: seven years on, Uber signed with Yellow Cab SF and Flywheel Technologies to put all of San Francisco's 1,075 taxis on its app, extending the New York City taxi-listing deal struck weeks earlier.
First-order effects
- DeSoto's drivers and dispatch operations now run under the Flywheel brand, with the co-marketing agreement steering riders from the e-hailing app into what had been radio-dispatched cabs.
- Flywheel gains a flagship San Francisco taxi fleet as a live customer for its app-based hailing and dispatch stack.
Second-order effects
- Competing fleets without a software partner — most visibly Yellow Cab — face a widening demand gap against branded-app taxis, pushing them toward their own platform deals or exit.
- Meter and payment hardware vendors lose ground as fleets adopting smartphone stacks like TaxiOS retire physical fare equipment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, taxi companies survive not as independent brands but as supply attached to whichever app owns the rider relationship — the endpoint visible in Uber absorbing both NYC and SF taxi fleets onto its own marketplace.
- The same displacement dynamic later repeats at a higher level of automation: Waymo's ~300-vehicle San Francisco operation shows the rider-relationship prize moving again, this time away from both apps and human-driven taxis alike.
The trend: Legacy taxi operators are dissolving their own brands into e-hailing platforms, trading identity for demand as the rider relationship concentrates in software.