Rich Strader

Former Chief Executive Officer Autonomic

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Rich Strader is an automotive technology executive who led Autonomic, the connected-vehicle cloud platform company, as Chief Executive Officer from November 2021. Autonomic built the Transportation Mobility Cloud, an attempt to solve a problem the car industry had not previously had to think about: once every vehicle is a networked device, somebody has to operate the cloud that ingests its telemetry, authenticates it, and exposes it safely to fleet operators, cities, transit systems and third-party developers. Ford acquired Autonomic in 2018 as part of a push into mobility services and ran it as an independent subsidiary before fully absorbing it into the parent company in 2023, since when the platform has underpinned Ford’s connected-vehicle and Ford Pro fleet offerings. Strader was an unusually natural choice to run it: he had spent nearly thirty years inside Ford, latterly as Vice President of Mobility Platforms and Products, and had also served as Chief Information Officer of Volvo Car Corporation.

Career Highlights

• Named Chief Executive Officer of Autonomic in November 2021, in an announcement that also promoted Manish Mishra to Chief Product Officer.
• Led the company behind the Transportation Mobility Cloud, an open cloud platform connecting vehicles, mass transit, city infrastructure and mobility service providers.
• Spent nearly three decades at Ford Motor Company, from 1992 to 2021.
• As Vice President of Mobility Platforms and Products at Ford, oversaw the technology underpinning the company’s mobility business, including connectivity, the FordPass platform, vehicle management as a service and transportation as a service.
• Earlier at Ford, served as Director of IT Security and Strategy.
• Served as Chief Information Officer of Volvo Car Corporation.
• Earlier in his career was President of Applied Processing Systems and a Principal Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Professional Journey

Strader trained as a computer engineer at the University of Michigan and began his career in software, working as a Principal Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation and later as President of Applied Processing Systems. He joined Ford Motor Company in 1992 and stayed for nearly thirty years.

His Ford career tracked the industry’s shift from information technology as a back-office function to software as part of the product. He served as Director of IT Security and Strategy, a role that in the automotive context spans both enterprise security and the emerging problem of vehicles as network endpoints. He also spent a period as Chief Information Officer of Volvo Car Corporation, which Ford owned until 2010 — an unusual assignment that gave him responsibility for a whole carmaker’s information systems rather than one function within a larger one.

By the end of his Ford tenure he was Vice President of Mobility Platforms and Products, leading the product solutions group responsible for designing and building the technology behind Ford’s mobility business: vehicle connectivity, the FordPass consumer platform, vehicle management as a service and transportation as a service. That work sat directly alongside Autonomic, which Ford had acquired in January 2018 in the same week it bought the transit software company TransLoc, as part of a broader mobility strategy.

In November 2021 Autonomic named him Chief Executive Officer. The company had been operating as a wholly owned but independent Ford Smart Mobility subsidiary, selling the Transportation Mobility Cloud beyond Ford as well as within it, and the appointment brought in a leader with deep institutional knowledge of the parent.

Autonomic did not remain a separate entity. In 2023 Ford fully integrated it into the parent company; the Transportation Mobility Cloud continues to operate as part of Ford’s connected-vehicle and Ford Pro offerings, but the Autonomic brand and its independent web presence are gone, with its domain now redirecting to Ford’s. No public source consulted records what Strader did after that integration.

Education

University of Michigan

Bachelor of Science in Engineering, Computer Engineering