Most reach trucks and forklifts come with many common safety features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would usually have dead-man petals. Moreover, certain manufacturers are providing more features such as speed controls which are able to decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more information, there are many available articles on Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of service and support is a really vital part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a range of new players in the lift truck industry each year. Although they offer a decent lift truck design and a nice price, if they do not provide the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you must be prepared for significant stress when the lift truck goes down. Every lift truck model goes down sooner or later and parts, service and general questions will probably need to be addressed at some point.
Normally, you will want a local dealer or repair shop with a huge supply of parts for the specific model and make you are purchasing. Be certain to visit the dealership or the repair shop and take a look at their parts room so as to try to know how many parts they store. Make certain to ask that if they do not have the part you require, where will it come from? With a bit of luck, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Furthermore, try to get some ideas as to how many of those specific units are currently being utilized in your vicinity. This is really important for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you must assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Also, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that model as well.