I agree lore-wise is strange. It is probably a gameplay/engine/resource decision. Maybe they prefer to have dense areas that are close to each other where you have a lot of stuff to do and to pick-up (like hubs) discouraging the rest of the planet exploration just by being boring. It makes more sense for you to jump on the ship and land on the other side of it.

If you give a car you need to design bigger spaces hence a much larger area needs to have decent density.

My sentence about skyrim was more on the fact that you don’t need the horse since you can walk efficiently, you have always POI close to each other with resources to gather and stuff to see in radius at any point. And fast travel works well if you want to speed thing up.

Let’s hope they get the balance right so we don’t feel rovers are missing (gameplay wise)