Yellow cabs date back to at least 1798, when the musical comedy, Cabriolet Jaune (Yellow Cab), debuted at Paris' Theatre de l'Opera Comique National. Yellow cabs were known in Paris and London throughout most of the 1800s. A yellow cab company shook up the New York Cab system in the mid-1880s, offering cheaper, more predictable fares than competitors. One of the first automobile cabs in London, in the 1890s, was a yellow electric automobile.^[1]

The Yellow Cab Company of Chicago was founded by John D. Hertz in 1907.^[2] Their specially designed taxicabs were powered by a 4-cylinder Continental engine equipped with a purpose-built taxicab body supplied by the Racine Body Co., of Racine, Wisconsin.^[3] According to Yellow Cab Co. tradition, the color (and name) yellow was selected by John Hertz as the result of a survey he commissioned at a "local university", which indicated it was the easiest color to spot.^[4] However, "he was certainly not the first taxicab operator to use that color and the university study to which B. C. Forbes refers has yet to be discovered."^[5] In 2017, a study showed that the color yellow, for taxis, was more noticeable, resulting in 9% fewer accidents.^[6]