Only the United States has ever operated a rover on Mars
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtLanding and driving a rover on Mars is so hard that only NASA has ever done it. The Soviet Union and later Russia lost lander after lander; Mars's surface was, in practice, an American-only club.
NowOn 22 May 2021, China's Zhurong rover rolled onto the surface of Utopia Planitia, making China the second nation ever to operate a rover on Mars, and the first to orbit, land, and deploy a rover all on its first attempt.
What actually happened
The difficulty is not exaggerated: Mars has a graveyard of failed landers, because the thin atmosphere is too thick to ignore and too thin to rely on, forcing a punishing sequence of aeroshell, parachute, and retrorockets in about seven minutes with no chance to intervene from Earth.
China's Tianwen-1 mission threaded all of it on the first try (orbit, soft landing, and rover deployment) something even NASA built up to over multiple missions and decades. This is 'updated' rather than a myth busted: NASA's record is still unmatched in number. But the specific line, that only the United States has driven a rover on Mars, stopped being true in May 2021.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2021, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2021 learned the earlier version.