Charging people 10k for a feature that will not be released during the lifetime of their car seems pretty exploitative to me.

You're not getting nothing for that 10k. I don't know where this idea's come from that nothing at all has been released.

That is not what exploitative means. You’re free to charge any amount for anything. Others are free to buy it or not. It’s not like you’re charging diabetics 10k for insulin. Nobody is forced to buy it.

If lying to take someone's money is not exploitation, I don't know what is.

Maybe some examples will help.

Things that are exploitation:

Slavery

Prison Labor

Victorian workhouses

Retail managers forcing minimum-wage employees to clock out before cleaning the store, knowing they won't complain because they can't afford to lose their job.

Things that are not exploitation:

Rich people paying to enable future software updates on their luxury car.

The dictionary lists three meanings for exploitation. Your examples are all for meaning 1—the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. But there is also another one—the fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself. Making use of people's optimism and warped perceptions about the imminentness of autonomous vehicles (warped perceptions which were formed in a large part by none other than Tesla itself) to part people from their money would fall under this definition.

And just to humour your point, let's say it's not exploitation. So what? It still would be deception, shameless lying, snake oil salesmanship, etc. etc. It's not like corporate actions are binary: exploitation and totally OK. Even if Tesla's actions were not exploitation, they would still be as wrong.

The common term for deception for financial gain is fraud.

If I choose to buy it under the assumption I will get it, and then I don’t, then it’s pretty clear cut. If the deal wasn’t one where I was exploited I’d like the $10k back with interest.

There has not been a gross over-usage of the word exploit in the past 10 years. See google trends, the word's usage is trending downward. Its peak was actually around 2005.

Google trends tracks what people are searching not what they are using.

Nope, they have data since the 1800's. Don't think they had search engines back then.

That's Google Ngram Viewer. It's different from Trends, unless they have merged them recently.

Ah thanks, i didn't know that