The little one is Sojourner, which landed with the Pathfinder mission, when lots of us were kids. There was a ton of news coverage, including in the kid news periodicals we'd get in school. So I think that cemented this idea in a lot of kids brains.
But, yeah, our latest rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance are both the size of a minivan. I remember that comparison featuring heavily in the coverage around Curiosity. (I also remember staying up late to watch the live JPL/NASA stream of its landing, with the new skycrane system they created for it. It was far enough away that it took roughly 8 minutes for the radio signals to make their trip from Mars to Earth, so that part was technically on physics-mandated time delay.)
I remember a bunch of coverage of Pathfinder's descent and landing tech, too. It had been in a big set of what were basically airbags which deployed as it neared the ground, and it bounced to its resting place, with the rover safely packed up inside the stationary probe that unfolded. All the space stuff is astounding, but I really can't imagine the engineering it took to make that stationary and secure enough to not bang and rattle apart while the whole package bounced around on the surface, but was also able to allow the rover to roll off the platform after it came to rest.)
The airbags got most of the coverage, so they were the part I remembered, but there were other components of the landing system to help it slow down and land safely, parachutes and rockets. Even with all that, it apparently rebounded 52 feet on the first impact, bouncing at least 15 times before coming to rest. You should read about it; it's pretty cool:
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