BP Pulse
electric vehicle charging company
Chargemaster Limited (branded as bp pulse, formerly BP Chargemaster, chargemaster, POLAR and Polar Plus) is a supplier of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, based in Milton Keynes, England. It provides charging units for home, business and public use, and operates its own electric vehicle fast charging network.
Chargemaster was the first company to manufacture electric vehicle rapid chargers in the UK. As of 2017, the company had supplied more than 30,000 charging points for electric vehicle drivers' homes and more than 10,000 public and commercially operated charging points.
The company was founded in 2008 by entrepreneur David Martell. In June 2018, BP announced that it had entered into an agreement to buy Chargemaster for £130m, with the company to be rebranded BP Chargemaster. Further rebranding to 'bp pulse' took place in December 2020.
History
Chargemaster was founded in Luton in 2008 by David Martell, the founder and former CEO of Trafficmaster. Shareholders included the venture capital arm of BMW, BMW i Ventures, and technology company Qualcomm.
The company launched its POLAR network of public charging points in 2011. By 2017, the network had over 5,000 public charging points, just under 40% of the total of more than 13,000 charging points in the UK.
In 2012, Chargemaster announced its involvement in a trial of wireless charging for electric vehicles in London, in partnership with Qualcomm.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “BP Pulse” as electric vehicle charging company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as electric vehicle charging company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39057719. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 5 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2008, 2018 and 2020.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “BP Pulse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.