Honda engine question

[diamondlarry]

Over at cleanmpg.com, this thread came up and I knew that somebody here could answer his question.

Hello, I am a new prius owner, but thats not why I'm here. I'm giving my Civic to my father so that he can drive it instead of his work truck when he isn't making deliveries and I wanted to see what I could do to drive that more efficiently so I can instruct him.

I drove it last weekend and used the scan gauge to monitor FE and I'm wondering if I drive the civic like the prius, except for throw it in neutral in the glide phase is that a good method? The rolling in neutral got ife higher and I had a decent run according to the scan gauge.

The civic has 118,000 miles, new tires, plus all recommended honda service completed.

One thing I'm curious about is that I heard that back in the days that the youngsters were moding the civic for street racing, they were able to tap the computer with a pda to change the valve settings to get more hp and integrate their other modifications. Since the civic models from that year all ran the same motor but got different MPG , were the differences in the valve settings and could the EX be set like one of the models that got better MPG via a similar procedure? If so, is this easy to do and how would I go about doing it?

Great site, thanks for any input.