Quote:
Originally Posted by squatch81
Hill  What is this Hill you speak of? 
The elevation varies less than 6 feet between my house and work (25 miles away) with only 1 small town in between. My driving is typically about 95% highway/back road travel (55mph). My mileage is upper 40's to lower 50's in the summer, lower 40's in the winter per tankful. I do not use pulse driving techniques because I feel the risk of being rear ended by inattentive drivers outweighs the fuel savings.
I do not have any instrumentation other than what the factory supplied, so my observations are primarily seat of the pants (wallet).
Ironically, my best tankfuls ever was when I was working nights in a city 50 miles away for a few weeks. Half my driving was at 55, the rest at 65, temp in the 70's. The dash display said I was averaging 55mpg, but when I filled the tank it worked out to 56 mpg on 2 consecutive tanks. 
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It seems our commutes are completely opposite! Which is why I hesitate to give specific advice on driving techniques because everybody's daily drives vary so greatly.
I drive 35-45 mph roads on my commute for 11 miles one way. There is decent elevation change throughout the commute...for about 8 miles I am either going up or down...the other 3 miles is fairly flat. This allows me to use neutral coast prior to 41 mph which keeps the car in 0 rpm when accelerating downhill past 41 mph.
I understand your reasons for not using heavy P&G on the highway...I use it though. If you get a decent stretch of highway without any cars around you try pulsing up to 65 mph then taking your foot off the GO pedal for a 3 count...you will feel the ICE bump and your MFD mpg bar will go full. At that point you can very, very lightly feather the pedal and still get a small amount of acceleration while keeping the mpg bar at full. If you get a chance to do this on a new tank watch the difference in mpg gains on your MFD vs. your regular driving gains on the MFD on a new tank.