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mytaxi had already lived several lives. RTÉ noted that in Ireland, where it was the biggest taxi app, it had been known as Hailo before becoming mytaxi, and that the switch to Free Now across 100 European cities was the result of a change of ownership: the company was now owned by Daimler and BMW. The official release, dated 2 July 2019 from Hamburg, explained that FREE NOW was part of the brand family created by the BMW and Daimler mobility merger, alongside SHARE NOW for car sharing, REACH NOW for multimodal trips, PARK NOW and CHARGE NOW.

The new name signalled an ambition beyond taxis. Europe CEO Eckart Diepenhorst called the day a huge milestone and the rebrand another step towards offering different services within the app, starting with hive electric scooters in Portugal, Poland and Austria. Taxi would always play a crucial role, he said, but user demands, regulation and technology were changing. Chief marketing officer Thomas Zimmermann gave the name its gloss: FREE NOW means freedom of mind, freeing passengers and drivers from everyday worries and stress. The company backed it with a double digit million euro international campaign.

The switch was frictionless by design. Neither passengers nor drivers had to install a new app; a regular update replaced mytaxi, and accounts and settings were unchanged. The release counted 14 million passengers, more than 100,000 drivers and 750 employees in 26 offices. In Ireland, RTÉ reported, the rebrand came with Match, a taxi sharing service trialled in Limerick, and general manager Alan Fox said average waiting time had fallen 7 percent, to under three and a half minutes.

The name is the problem. FREE NOW sounds like a promotion, and in a sector built on fares it invites the question of what exactly is free. It also only makes full sense inside a family of NOW brands, a system whose value depends on every sibling completing its own rebrand, as Zimmermann himself admitted. Dropping a known product name, after already dropping Hailo, spends recognition again. The execution was tidy and the multiservice logic sound, but freedom of mind is the kind of abstraction that sits awkwardly on a taxi.