The controversial new livery on their 2007 F1 car tells you a lot of what you need to know about Honda’s big message of the moment.

The F1 car is on the Honda stand in Geneva, among the less exotic road cars; and if you haven’t already seen the story, it defies all the money-grabbing conventions of Grand Prix racing by not having a single sponsors name or logo anywhere on its bodywork.

What it does have is a real image of the earth, taken from space, and showing an essentially green planet that’s under threat from the very things Honda makes, and which are vilified most by the kind of people who think racing cars in particular are the work of the devil.

But what Honda is trying to say, with the F1 car livery and with everything it is headlining at Geneva, is that the motor industry can see the problem, and can contribute to a solution—without destroying the enjoyment of driving that many people still feel.

So at the top of the Honda pile here is their commitment to hybrid technologies, which they already market in the Civic Hybrid, and which they reckon will have the broadest benefit if it is available in small, affordable cars, not just big, expensive ones.

Small Hybrid Sports Car Concept

So they promise another all-new hybrid car for 2009, and they say they will achieve 200,000 global hybrid sales then. But following that insistence that environmentally responsible doesn’t have to mean dull, the design study they are presenting to hint at that future production model is the Small Hybrid Sports Car Concept, whose name tells you pretty much where Honda thinking is going.

Designed in Europe, the car concentrates on combining high fuel efficiency with real driving excitement, through hybrid technology and advanced aerodynamics. And if it goes as well as it looks, Honda will have proved the point.

Alongside it, they also show their next-generation ”super-clean” diesel engine—for which they claim exhaust gas emissions reduced to the level of a gasoline engine, partly because of new catalyst technology that generates its own ammonia without the need for the urea injection that will be part of the next-generation diesel strategy.

And they are looking to introduce that to the U.S. within three years, as well as to Europe and Japan. They also showed the fully drivable version of the fuel-cell FCX Concept they previewed in Paris last year, and announced they plan limited sales of a fuel-cell vehicle as early as next year.

If you are at a motor show because you love cars and driving, it’s an encouraging message.