General Motors (GM) CEO Rick Wagoner announced that 2006 had been a good year for the corporation in Europe, and that it had needed to be. He also told us that GM firmly believes that oil alone is unlikely to supply all the world’s automotive energy needs for very much longer—and that is both a challenge and an opportunity—and one that, if Geneva is anything to judge by, clearly underpins GM’s current product thinking to a very deep level, especially for Europe.

The key, he says, is in energy diversity, offering several different sources of power, sometimes alone, sometimes in combination, all with the broad aim of reducing CO₂ emissions—with auto makers, fuel suppliers, governments and consumers working together.

So GM has focused recently on technologies from electricity and hybrid to bio-fuels liquid gas, and fuel cells, and especially they are increasingly thinking diesel for smaller cars. In short, by whatever means, they are looking one way or another to displace gasoline.

So their e-Flex program, headlined by Volt in Detroit, proposes electrical power but from various sources (hence Flex), from hydrogen to wind power; and they are big believers in bio-ethanol, which is now the world’s fastest growing (sometimes literally growing, in the form of vegetable mass) alternative fuel. Hence the Saab bio-power initiative, extended here with the 9.3 Bio Power family, en-route to making every Saab 100 percent bio-capable.

Alongside that, though, there’s the diesel push, and a new family of V6 diesel engines that they say offer a 25 percent CO₂ benefit against a comparable gasoline engine.

Showing that they are serious, too, a 250-horsepower 3.0-liter V6 diesel will be available, some time after it first appears later this year with gasoline power, in the handsome new Cadillac CTS that they showed here. That will give it one more weapon in its armory against the European premium brands whose home ground it still needs to make real headway into; but also helping the new CTS will be conspicuously improved interior design quality, which has always been a weak point but they are gradually coming to grips with.

And as GM Europe’s President Carl Peter Forster underlined, they are very serious about what he calls the U.S. GM brands’ “continuing journey into Europe.” So you can look forward not only to those improved interiors, but also all-wheel drive options, direct-injection gasoline engines, and far more refined diesels with up to eight separate injection phases in each firing cycle. All aimed, he says, at “driving the corporation towards environmental and technological leadership.” What’s more, with GM now, this has a real feel of urgency about it.

Not that they are abandoning the guys who just want to have fun, and the younger end of the market. Chevrolet sold 340,000 cars in Europe in 2006, and sales are growing after some careful re-branding. The HHR that they unveiled here could just be funky enough to do them some good here, as the PT Cruiser briefly did for Chrysler, but it isn’t all window dressing, it actually looks very versatile inside, and just the thing for an active audience.

On the domestic front, with 192-horsepower, the fastest ever Corsa, labeled VXR or OPC depending on market, is a serious pocket-rocket, developed at the Nürburgring and with an “overboost” turbo function that two-time Le Mans winner Manuel Reuter described as “addictive.”

And finally the GTC concept that we’ve already described previews “the next chapter in the GM design language.” If it really does, they’re not quite dead yet.