Depends on what kind of vehicle he is looking for.
-- tl:dr at the end --
Sub-compacts are great on fuel, but they tend to not be great for highway driving (both for comfort and transmission gearing) and are terrible for transporting anything (including people).
For instance, my car (2012 Kia Rio5) is advertised as a car capable of 8.8 city/6.3 hwy l/100km. In practice, I get about 9.5 l/100km city and 6.9 l/100km hwy (at 100 km/h). It's a great little car, but will only seat two people comfortably (the key word here) and can carry about a person's worth of cargo. Tool up to anything faster than 100 km/h (such as in Alberta or Saskatchewan where the speed limit is 110 km/h) and the consumption jumps into the high 7's per 100.
The car is designed to be a short-range people transporter for a couple or very small family. Not a long-range highway runner.
A brand new Dodge Charger is claimed to get 12.2 city/7.7 hwy with the Pentastar V6 (assuming my numbers, that would be about 13 and 8 in real life) which isn't that much worse considering it's about three times the size and could likely comfortably seat 5 people with all their luggage in the trunk.
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In the end, I would recommend something midsize, and something that is geared to run the highway speed he wants to run (i.e. if he does interstates, he should be at low rpms in the top gear at say 70 mph, running anything above about 1500-2000 is just wasting fuel),
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