The Toyota Alphard and Himedic are both very similar "cars" in that they're extremely off kilter additions to a racing game that are arguably included for marketing purposes between business partners PD and Toyota. That, and they serve no purpose whatsoever in the game, but that can be said for roughly 80% of the car list in GT7, so I'm not sure how valid a criticism against a car that argument is.
"But Gran Turismo games have always been about these oddball cars in the past! It's part of the series' DNA!", some of the fans of these additions might quip. That may be true, but times, and the series as a whole, has changed so much since those good old days. Back then, you had obscure, oddball cars from many of the manufacturers in the game; think your Toyota Priuses before it became mainstream. Your Autozam AZ-1 A-Specs before anyone outside of Japan knew what the heck a Kei car is, and no one in Japan knew what an Autozam was. A Renault Espace with a freaking F1 engine slammed into it. Something called a Tom's Angel. An FF rally car from Citroën I still can't pronounce to this day.
In GT7, the only oddballs that exist in real life are two pickup trucks, a military Jeep, an FF LMP1, a luxury minivan, a Sambabus, and an ambulance. Three of those aforementioned seven are Toyotas. Of course, your exact definition of an "oddball" car may vary from mine, and if you're willing to include fictional cars, that ratio would look a lot more balanced. This is just my interpretation of things.
In the past games, not every oddball car showed up in the dealerships; you had to earn them as prize cars by winning certain events, and they'd almost certainly always come as a surprise. "I didn't even know this car was in the game/existed in real life! What can I do with it?!" If you found an overlooked car and tuned it up to be surprisingly good, you found it. It was your surprise sleeper. Here in GT7, these oddball cars are often added in post launch updates, well after its active playerbase has long finished the insultingly short single player campaign. It'd be like receiving a landmine after the war has ended. The heck am I supposed to do with it? Not to mention, cars in earlier Gran Turismo games, oddball or not, always had some place to race, somewhere they belonged, some purpose they fit. There were a wealth of races and events to enter said cars in whatever state of tune you might happen to have it in. In GT7, I can't find a single event that would allow me to enter a bone stock Alphard or Himedic wherein they'd actually stand a sporting chance of being able to fantasise about keeping up with the rest of the pack, let alone be viable picks.
With the Gran Turismo series gravitating more and more towards hyperrealism, the game feels more and more like a simulator and a job and less like... a game. Even a feature added as recently in Gran Turismo Sport, the "Car Handicap Bonus", would've made these uncompetitive and oddball cars so much more rewarding to simply drive in an event. But, not only was that feature completely removed in GT7, we now run the risk of losing a third of the race winnings if we bump into the AI cars too hard in these suboptimal picks, or, more realistically speaking, the AI bumps too hard into these moving houses on wheels. With the vast majority of the "races" in GT7 being the god–awful "chase the rabbit" style ordeals that task the players with closing a 40 second gap within 5 laps, it only funnels the players into picking the most optimal cars with the most optimised setups, leaving less wiggle room for experimentation and fooling around. To suddenly have a luxury minivan and an ambulance added to such a game then, is such a tonal whiplash. It's like the game can't decide what it wants to be, and how it wants to be played.
Don't get me wrong; I was really excited when I saw Kaz's silhouette teasers for these cars in their respective updates. To me personally, Gran Turismo has always been about a wide variety of road cars, allowing us to sample cars that you and I realistically can, or even have experienced, in the real world. That holds especially true for me as a Singaporean, because our country hates cars, our laws strangle all car culture out of the country, and nowhere in this microscopic, densely populated island country can anyone legally go over 90km/h unless they're driving an emergency vehicle. To someone like me, driving in a simulator and driving in real life has been two completely different and wholly seperate affairs with no correlation or transferrable experiences and skills, and Gran Turismo is the much needed marriage between the two. As the series slowly began to edge away from these everyday relatable cars, seeing an Alphard and Himedic join the likes of the Honda Fit and Toyota Prius was a sight for sore eyes for me.
I haven't been in an ambulance in real life yet, but I have driven a regular HiAce in real life when I was a delivery driver. Of course, the thought of being a hero and cornering hard in it has crossed my mind more than often, but I never really did it because the thing scared me. It had ultra crashy leaf springs in the rear, no ABS, everything sqeaked and rattled, and the whole thing felt... disconcertingly light on its feet at highway speeds. There was also virtually no crumple zone between the upright windscreen and whatever you're dumb enough to smash into. There was ZERO blind spot visibility in HiAces not specced with cargo room windows. The steering column went right between the clutch and brake pedal too, so heel toe–ing was completely out of the question. My boss tells me the reason he fits expensive Michelin tyres on his vans instead of cheaper, no name Chinese brands is because he broke the rear end loose on a wet downhill when slowing for a red light. Yeah, hell no I'm not trying anything stupid in it.
But it was a NA diesel with enough torque from idle to no gas, clutch in launch it from 2nd gear. That was cool.
Unsurprisingly, none of those real life eccentricities made their way into Gran Turismo 7 with the Himedic, but what really caught me by surprise was just how... stable and no drama it was to drive, the Himedic and Alphard both. They can be broadly described as "slow as hell, rev out each gear, prepare for understeer deep into turns, the thing stops much better than it turns, watch yourself on downhill braking zones". In fact, most of the eccentricities are from just the sheer heft of the thing, especially the Himedic. With almost nothing past the windshield of the ambulance, you can drive to about having a quarter of a conventional car below the bottom of your screen in bumper cam view before you make contact. The game's radar system was never made to accomodate something of the Himedic's gargantuan size with its one–size–fits–most arrows, and so discerning how much space to give a competitor, whether they're driving a regular car or another Himedic, is something my peers and I are still yet to figure out, as evidenced by the slightly chaotic Saturday lobby races.
It should be no surprise that the ambulance is horrible for racing in stock trim. 3rd gear goes up to 101km/h, past which the whole thing crumbles into a heap. 4th is so gutless that it made me aware of inclines that are so gentle, they are never seen or felt in anything else. Did you know that the small straight leading up to the final turn of Yamagiwa is a slight uphill? Me neither, until my Himedic refused to accelerate past 101km/h in 4th gear on that stretch. This thing is so slow that it could legitimately go round the outer loop of Tokyo Central Expressway without once touching the brakes at "race" pace in stock guise, Comfort Medium tyres and all. It's nigh impossible to gain on another competitor in a race if there's a hard wall at 100km/h, especially when combined with the sheer size of the damn things. The races may look closely fought, but even with a slight overlap to a competitor, I'm realistically light years away still from being able to make a safe and fair move on them.
I was ready to say that the Himedic is yet another useless, out of place car in the game, completely uneventful and a bore to drive, until something from @Obelisk 's review caught my attention: the thing maxes out near 550PP on Sports Soft tyres...? If it has so much drag limiting its top speed, chunky tyres with a widebody, then it might, just might, shine on a slow, technical track with speed acceleration bursts making up most of its PP value. Fortunately, the best race in this game happens to be at the tortuously tight tediously technical Tsukuba... with the PP limit set at 550... limited to Sports tyres.
I HAD to give it a try!
The ambulance is not an easy car to set up right, but I actually like that in the Himedic; it's an off kilter pick, of course it's going to require more work to set up! It wouldn't be an oddball pick if it were easy! Power and mass are easy fixes, and you can even increase the body rigidity of the ambulance no problem, but what is beyond fixing is the ambulance's long wheelbase, making me wish it had rear steer. It's also obscenely front heavy, but with so much weight pressing down on the rear tyres even with the full Stage 3 mass reduction, I still have enough weight over the rear tyres to run a 20/80 torque split and the full +5 rearward brake bias. The NA 2TR-FE Inline 4 of the stock Himedic is already a peaky pick to begin with, and to get the requisite power to compete at 550PP, I had to go with the High RPM Turbo Kit, which retains the peak power spike but worsens the buildup to it. This of course requires setting up the gearbox to be ultra close in ratio to keep the drivetrain happy, and with its hopelessly draggy body limiting its top speed, ultra short as well.
I didn't spend a lot of time setting up the ambulance (hell, I probably spent twice as long writing this than setting it up), and you can see my setup in whole and the resulting performance in this video!
In stock guise, the Himedic is a bore to drive and impossible to have a race with, single or multiplayer. But, being able to do well in such a notoriously difficult race in an oddball pick has reignited some of that old Gran Turismo magic for me, and for that one reason alone, I can't call it a useless beater 
