[demick]

Yes, I understand that a locking center console is useful for a convertible. But I have to manually lock it with the key. If I've just locked it, then I already know it's locked.

But if I haven't locked it, then I could really care less whether it is latched or not.

Perhaps the original idea was an automatically locking console that locks with the car locks. In that case it would be important to notify you if the console is latched or not. But then perhaps the concept of an auto-locking console was nixed by the bean counters, but the console monitoring switch was not removed, and became a useless left-over.

Just speculating.