Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 4

• Tesla says Model 3 orders top $10 billion in first 36 hours: Tesla Motors said orders for its new Model 3 electric sedan topped 253,000 in the first 36 hours -- a fast start for the company's first mass-market vehicle, which may not begin to reach customers for another 18 months or more. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that the Model 3, which is slated to go into production in late 2017, will sell at an average price of $42,000, including the price of options and additional features, which would give the initial flurry of orders an estimated retail value of $10.6 billion. That intense interest, fanned in part by a steady stream of tweets by Musk, could help boost Tesla's stock price, which closed Friday at $237.59, up 3.4 percent. The stock has soared more than 60 percent since hitting a 12-month low in February. The car's average selling price projected by Musk is well above the $35,000 base price. Analysts earlier had estimated the first Model 3s off the factory line in Fremont, California, could be loaded with extra equipment and sell for $50,000 to$60,000. Tesla has undertaken a costly expansion of the Fremont plant, aiming to boost annual capacity to 500,000 by 2020, with production of the Model 3, the company's first mass-market car, ramping up slowly through 2019. Some analysts said the company could have trouble filling all the initial Model 3 orders, which are accompanied by a refundable $1,000 deposit, until 2020. Barclays analyst Brian Johnson on Friday said the heavy influx of Model 3 orders "sets the stage for an equity offering" later this year by Tesla, much of which would go toward factory construction and product development.

• China’s Companies Poised to Take Leap in Developing a Driverless Car: some argue that conditions in China are actually more favorable for quick adoption of driverless cars, in part because of more aggressive support from the national and local governments. And, unlike in the United States, China never fully developed a romance with the open road and car ownership. Car ownership has spiked in China, of course. And in recent years, it has become a middle-class status symbol to own a car. For the ultrawealthy, there are clubs dedicated to Ferraris and Maseratis. But enormous traffic jams in China’s largest cities can make driving a less-than-romantic experience. Why not let a machine built with artificial intelligence inside do the work for you? “It’s not that people are more willing to use the cars in Beijing or Shanghai, it’s that the economic value is much higher in China than in the U.S.,” Mr. Mosquet said, adding that air pollution could be as much a catalyst as bad traffic. Even as American companies like Google and Tesla work on autonomous vehicles, a number of Chinese companies are working on driverless car technology. The Internet company Leshi Internet Information & Technology (better known as Letv) has a driverless car tech unit, and the Chinese carmaker Great Wall Motors has opened a research center in Silicon Valley. The assumed leader in the field in China is the search engine company Baidu, which has been at work on autonomous vehicles since 2013.

• Jeff Bezos just live-tweeted his space company’s latest rocket launch: Opening the doors to his space company to the media for the first time last month, Jeff Bezos said he had kept the company so quiet and secretive for a simple reason: “We’ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.” Now Bezos is talking — and tweeting. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com (and owner of The Washington Post) not only announced ahead of time that his space company would launch a rocket on Saturday, but he live-tweeted it, giving his followers a play-by-play of the event, and a few inside glimpses. Saturday’s liftoff from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas was the third consecutive time the company has launched and landed its reusable New Shepard suborbital vehicle, which consists of a rocket and a capsule designed to take astronauts just past the edge of space. While the company has yet to fly any humans — Bezos said that test flights with humans are probably a year away — it has now demonstrated that its rocket can fly repeatedly. Bezos, and others, believe that is a key step toward lowering the cost of spaceflight, and therefore making it more accessible. Typically the first stages of rockets are discarded after each use. But Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk are developing technologies to land the first stages vertically, using the engine thrust to slow them down. The United Launch Alliance is also working to recover the engines of its new rocket. But in his live-tweeting Saturday, Bezos not only chronicled the launch and landing, but also showed how the company paints a turtle on the capsule to commemorate each successful launch. He even tweeted a picture of a pair of new cowboy boots with the company’s motto printed on them. That motto is “Gradatim Ferociter,” loosely translated to “Step by Step, Ferociously,” which captures the ethos of the company to move methodically toward its goals. That’s also why it uses the symbol of a tortoise, which moved slowly but still crossed the finish line ahead of the hare.

• Apple's Push to Flood India With Used iPhones Ignites Backlash: Apple Inc.’s latest attempt to crack the Indian smartphone market -- by selling used phones -- is meeting a wall of resistance. The iPhone maker is seeking permission to become the first company allowed to import and sell used phones into the country, its second attempt in as many years. This time, the stakes are higher and a growing number of industry executives are fighting the move, warning government officials in private that it’ll open the floodgates to electronic waste, jeopardize local players, and make a farce of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India program to encourage local manufacturing. “Make in India could turn into Dump in India,” said Sudhir Hasija, chairman of Karbonn Mobiles, who said it sells about 1.7 million phones a month. Apple’s application in 2015 was rejected by the environment ministry without much fanfare. But things have changed since: India, as the world’s second largest mobile population, now represents a vast untapped opportunity for Apple just as China and the U.S. are slowing. Apple has publicly talked up its prospects in India and is on course to get the green light to open its first retail stores. Apple now has less than 2 percent of an Indian market in which four-fifths of phones cost less than $150. Branded smartphones are available for as little as $35 in India. Western multinationals from car-makers to soda vendors use “India only” prices and cut-rate “India edition” products to woo customers. Apple can’t employ those strategies without tarnishing its marquee phone’s premium aura.