Call him Hot Rod or Rodimus, or Rodimus of Nyon if you're feeling especially formal; he's got a good spark, but you might need to tread carefully to find it.
Hot Rod came online in Nyon, 4.2 million years ago. To him it was like "waking up".
After the Heart of Darkness was purged, Cybertron came alive again in a primordial state. Rodimus and the Autobots set up High Command in the remains of the Kimia crash just as Cybertron's long lost civilian population returned to repopulate the planet.
A new political landscape began to unfold, with the Autobots coordinating with the captured Decepticons and surly returnees, dubbed Non-Aligned Indigenous Lifeforms (or NAILs) by Prowl. Worse, the Matrix was now hollowed out and empty.
Its power apparently lost forever. Inside its shell, however, Perceptor and Rewind a curious inscription and a photonic starchart... a map. Rodimus and Drift seized upon the idea that the map led to the legendary Cyberutopia of the Knights of Cybertron.
Despite the objections of Bumblebee and Prowl, Rodimus believed that finding the Knights of Cybertron was the best hope for reuniting their fractured people. As he began making plans to pursue the map, Rodimus was bequeathed half the Matrix's shell by Orion Pax, formerly Optimus Prime, who left for deep space in exile to signify the end of the war.
As part of preparations, Rodimus conspired with Prowl to take Overlord in an attempt to extract information from the former Decepticon.
With Ultra Magnus at his side, Rodimus sent out word to all Autobots and Cybertronians that he planned to search for the Knights, and rallyed more than 200 'bots to join the crew of his new ship, the Lost Light. Things went wrong from the very start, though. The Lost Light suffered a freak quantum jump in the upper atmosphere as it launched, catapulting the ship halfway across the galaxy. Roughly 40 crew members fell out into open space as they rematerialized, and fell down to the planet below.