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"Generally, the human race avoids doing anything radical until forced into it."
- Frederik Pohl

Surface Car  
  A specialized vehicle for traveling on a planetary surface.  

Compare this term to the more futuristic "aircar" (which first appeared in The New York Times in 1871!).

At the landing field itself, under the blazing carbon dioxide lamps, a small man drove up in a surface car, showed an authorization to the guard, passed into the burglar-proof enclosure.
Technovelgy from Satellite Five, by Arthur K. Barnes.
Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938
Additional resources -

Philip K. Dick uses this, and similar ideas, in Progeny (1954):

ED DOYLE hurried. He caught a surface car, waved fifty credits in the robot driver’s face, mopped his florid face with a red pocket-handkerchief, unfastened his collar, perspired and licked his lips and swallowed piteously all the way to the hospital...

It was a good feeling. He had felt it before, during years of business dealings in the “Colonies”, the frontier, the fringe of Terran civilization where the streets were still lit by electric lights and doors opened by hand.

Yet another of the terms like like groundcar, post-crime and static house.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Satellite Five
  More Ideas and Technology by Arthur K. Barnes
  Tech news articles related to Satellite Five
  Tech news articles related to works by Arthur K. Barnes

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