Data caps make that hard. While everyone likes to claim unlimited data, I'm not aware of any providers that don't have a heavy data user clause where they'll deprioritize your data if you're a top ~5% data user (usually somewhere over ~1TB/month).
You also will need _some_ sort of encoding locally before uploading, even if it's minimal, which could lead to issues when encoded again (although there are codecs available to minimize this).
The claim was "It is cheaper", not "It will be cheaper". Until it actually _is_ cheaper, it doesn't make much sense to purchase $10k+ in hardware to run local models that are still worse than the frontier offerings.
The purpose of the sandbox is to reduce permission fatigue. If it fails to run a command in the sandbox and retries it outside the sandbox, the regular permission rules apply. You'll still be prompted for any non-sandboxed tool calls that you haven't allowed or denied via permission rules.
ESPHome is owned by the same group as Home Assistant, not Espressif. So Espressif getting greedy would just mean higher prices for their chips (or they could lock down development on their chips, but that seems very unlikely).
> my car is parked outside ... the interior temperatures can easily rise over 150f
I live in Arizona as well and this is why you'll see everyone in parking lots parking under trees in the summer, with empty spaces in between.
Teslas have overheat protection (turns on the AC when interior temp > 105F) for a reason (one of them because it's cheaper to manufacture cars that don't need to withstand higher temperatures).
You also will need _some_ sort of encoding locally before uploading, even if it's minimal, which could lead to issues when encoded again (although there are codecs available to minimize this).