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I'm a bit late to respond, but over on CleanMPG the undisputed master of MPG is a guy named Sean, aka "RighLaneCruiser." His lifetime average MPG is above 90MPG. Anyone who can get those numbers over a lifetime must know something. When I asked him about the optimum cruising speed he told me that it was 36-37 MPH, 5th gear, lean burn, level road. I have since done some driving of my Insight in that range and I can confirm that the economy is pretty impressive under those conditions. On a recent trip to the area of Eunice, LA, absolutely flat rice growing country, I was getting 100-125 MPH on country roads, depending on .25 degree or less up/down grades and on road texture. It is only possible to pull around 80-85 mpg on the highway in the 50-55 MPH range. I realize that this anecdotal and not a carefully controlled experiment, which I think is impossible given the extreme sensitivity of the car.
BTW, lean burn is displayed on a ScanGauge with special programming of the X-gauge feature. Go to CleanMPG and search for "lean burn" and "X-gauge." Several folks have listed the code, but I don't have it handy. As someone else noted, it is also detectable by the sudden jump in the fuel consumption display to numbers greater than 75 MPG(assuming engine warmup).
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