Cute little buggy. Interesting wheel construction.

There are 24 sets in the Life on Mars theme, most of them are little polybags or characters. LOM wouldn't be too hard to go for 100% theme collection, even 20 years after release.

Excellent little set. I got it bundled in 78777 as a gift from family. To date these are the only Life on Mars sets I own.

Love the ages 6-12. My 5 year daughter would laugh at this set.

Set design is clearly from early 2K. Thank god I was in my dark ages back then. There were some good sets too, but most were unimaginative.

It looks like one of those toy cars that run on lantern batteries that kids can ride around their driveway, and yet somehow it’s still larger than 3177.

I feel this poor assistant dude only gets the smallest, most exposed vehicles to drive around on Mars with. One of you other astronauts, just give him a windscreen already!

The very long probe at the side and protruding from his vehicle links with the previous RSOTD space set, maybe he is in a hurry to find an alien to probe? Life on Mars only lasted 1 year so missed completely. Possibly Star Wars too popular so dropped, but
having too many small sets and the main sets 7316 and 7317 a bit odd and not very appealing didn't help?

I have a feeling I've got this in a box in the attic somewhere. I missed this line when it first came out, but because of LEGO Racers 2 it still holds a special place in my heart.

@MCLegoboy said:
"Geez dude, this little thing has three different set numbers for various releases."

That was pretty common for sets of this size in the 90s and early 00s.

I loved how they made wheels on this one, it was unusual.
I also used that torso and head print a lot, the ones I still have are quite faded.

My favorite part of Life on Mars was the alien designs, that brought new head and leg molds to the bodies used for Star Wars Battle Droids. The aliens got the coolest sets in the theme, while the human sets all look a bit wonky. I had a friend who got the human's "big rocket" set and it was mostly a cockpit with a long open Technic frame covered by a plastic/paper type sheet that then attached to the engines at the end. Very weird, kind of fragile and not that attractive. Meanwhile the aliens had sand red and sand purple and all these crazy colors that were rarely seen again and they just looked cool, they had mechs, they had air tubes, fliers etc.

I adore little Space polybags like this

It kind of looks like this set comes with 2 minifigs. As a kid i would be disappointed finding out just one inside the box.

The wheels are nice. I’ve never seen a dome piece used for that purpose.

@MCLegoboy:
1413 was a polybag version that appears to have been produced exclusively for Kabaya in Japan (they packed stuff with gum or candy, and the SW minis that a friend of mine shipped me when he was living over there had a retail-ready polybag packed with a couple nearly-flavorless gumballs in a plain clear wrapper, all inside a retail-ready outer box, which was just...bizarre).

I'm not 100% certain about this, but based on who has 7301 for sale, this may have been the European boxed version.

And that leaves 7309, which appears to have been the North American boxed version (hard to say as Bricklink shows the 7301 box for the "original box" entry on 7309), which was also included in the 78777 multipack (which also appears to have been a North American exclusive).

These days, they keep the set numbers the same, but change the SKU to differentiate between regional variations. Recently, they've had problems stocking product to the US, so they've had to slap a bunch of stickers on EU sets to make them NA-compliant, with the appropriate warning text, the piece count, and so on.

@xboxtravis7992:
They weren't bad, though they would have benefited drastically from the Ninjago skeleton arms that came out several years later (which were a lot more robust than Battle Droid arms, and would have matched the look of the legs better). Mars Mission, on the other hand, tried to cheat and make a single element that could double as both the arm and leg, and combined with the odd decision to use trans-green for the aliens, it just didn't turn out very well. Anyways, I had this crazy idea back in the day where I wanted to take a red Battle Droid torso and add, in one matching color, the Battle Droid arms and LoM head and legs. I'd throw on a cape, and call it Martian Manhunter. The only problem is the LoM heads were pretty much all turquoise, with one instance each of green and bright-green. And the only similar shade they produced the legs in was lime.

Rover is a stereotypical dog name though! And yesterday we got a dog!