The Energon Pub

It's also worth considering that in almost every version of Transformers, a higher government authority appoints Optimus Prime the function of Commander over the Autobot army. And he is usually not originally the type of 'bot you would consider to be their first pick...like the origin story in G1, where Optimus Prime is born out of the mortally wounded body of Orion Pax (a dock worker).

It might not be that Optimus is reckless with his life (as Megatron might accuse him of being), but that he knows he is expendable. The council can pick another Autobot to lead their forces.

You know, I immediately thought of that short story in the Transformers Legends anthology (can't remember the name..."A Meeting of Primes" or something) where all of the dead Primes from all the various cartoon continuities are thrown together in a bar and starting talking to one another, trying to figure out where they are and what had happened. They end up realizing that they're in the Armada world when someone mentions Minicons, and that they're all there for a sort of intervention to send that particular Prime back to the land of the living (or something along those lines). I thought it was pretty clever, and it really highlighted the fact that, yes, Prime does die a whole lot. Suicidal, though? Hardly. He doesn't have a death wish, he's just courageous.