The IEEE 802.11ad waveform can be used for automotive radar by exploiting the Golay complementary sequences in the preamble of a frame. The performance of radar, however, is limited by the preamble structure. In this paper, we propose an adaptive preamble design that permits a trade-off between radar parameters’ estimation accuracy and communication rate. To quantify this trade-off, we propose a minimum mean square error (MMSE) metric based on rate distortion theory. The simulation results demonstrate that by adapting the preamble structure, we can achieve decimeter-level range mean square error (MSE) per symbol duration and gigabit per second (Gbps) data rates simultaneously for a distance up to 280 m.