Unexpectedly good highway MPG

[Thymeclock]

I just returned from a 600 mile round trip in the A/T '09 hatchback. Our car is used only in local city driving, and it gets only 23 MPG locally.

With the A/C on for the entire trip, the scan gauge was reading 37 MPG at 70-72 MPH. If we drove at 60-65 MPH we got 39.5 MPG. I could hardly believe it! Manual calculation of actual fuel used confirmed this. That's considerably more than the EPA estimates for that year, which as I recall were only 35 MPG highway.

The only thing I can attribute this to is having the (original) tires over-inflated to 40 PSI. The car was very comfortable for two people to travel in, and I enjoyed driving it.

Now if there were only some way to reprogram the TC lockup on the automatic transmission and improve the lousy city MPG...