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Former General Motors chairman and CEO Roger Smith has died at the age of 82.

Smith was in charge of GM for nine turbulent years across the 1980s, retiring in 1990. His appointment marked the transition from the old collegiate GM of Everett Sloan but many of his ideas for centralisation, global operations and diversification have since been undone.

Smith was behind the merger with Hughes Aircraft in 1985 and the acquisition of Ross Perot's EDS group in the late 1980s. Both were later demerged. He was a strong believer in the power of technology and automation, right the way through from highly robotised manufacturing facilities to automated operations that would remove the power of drivers to cause accidents.

Under Smith, many of the established US marques that came under the GM umbrella lost their individual identities, and he admitted later in his life that plans that he oversaw for massive carmaking plants producing single models for global markets had been too ambitious.

Smith achieved a dubious global fame towards the end of his GM tenure by becoming the first "butt" for the maverick documentary film-maker Michael Moore, whose film "Roger and me" chronicled the effect of plant closures on Flint, Michigan.