Yeah, this part is crazy. There's vast parts of North America which are frozen solid for 5 months of the year. The fact they'd ship it all the way to Antarctica without testing on snow is just crazy!
I suspect a lot of the reason for not going north, was for publicity. It sounds like a great deal of hucksterism was involved. Maybe going to Canada would not have generated enough press.
The budget for development was absurdly low, even adjusted for today’s dollars. I suspect funding was always foremost in their minds.
Indeed there were probably truck drivers in the area who were already experienced with winter driving on bald tires. If not, they could have brought it up to Da Frozen Tundra, aka Green Bay.
The issue is moving it is really expensive, slow and there's not the capacity in those areas to make iterations on the design. There may not have been enough money to actually test it.
There is no way that having it fail in Antarctica was any cheaper. "We can't afford to test it" is a great example of output focused thinking when what is needed is an outcome focus.
The intended goal was enabling lots of safe travel through the Antarctic, something they failed at. In modern dollars they paid $50k per mile of successful trip. They could have spent way less money to achieve that goal with other approaches. Heck, they probably could have just turned the money into $1 bills and burned it to keep the explorer warm for such a short trip.
I'm not so sure there was a reasonable place to test it in North America at the time. There wasn't an actual highway to Alaska until after this was abandoned in Antarctica and even today most of the northern bits of Canada are best accessed by plane instead of roads. You could find some snow but it would be a very different snow than they would encounter in Antarctica.
It would still be snow, though, which would have let them discover the issue of the bald tires, and I'd guess the issues that required them to drive the thing backwards. If there weren't enough of it in a convenient spot, people were already making artificial snow by then. Or they could have just bulldozed a lot of it into a test course.
So they could at least have learned something. But if you're right and Antarctica was the closest place to test it, then they should have planned for that. Expecting something novel to work the first time it's tried isn't a plan. It isn't a strategy. It's just a fantasy.
You could probably find snow reasonably close but it wouldn't be the same kind of snow you'd find in Antarctica. The interstate highways didn't exist until after WW2 and the road to Alaska was completed as part of WW2.
I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme.