Most forklifts and lift trucks come with a lot of common safety features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would usually have dead-man petals. Moreover, some manufacturers are providing more features like for example speed controls that are able to decrease the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more info, there are many available articles about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Service and Support
A huge part of lift truck selection is to make sure that you maintain access to high levels of service and support. Each year, there seems to be a wider array of new players within the lift truck industry. Although they provide a nice price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not offer the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you should be prepared for major stress when the lift truck goes down. Every lift truck model goes down at some point and parts, service and general questions must be answered at some point.
Usually, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a great supply of components for the specific model and make you are buying. Be certain to visit the repair shop or the dealership and check 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 component you need, where would it come from? With any luck, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units presently used in your vicinity. This is doubly vital for specialty trucks such as turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you should assume they might not be stocking many if any parts for them. Also, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model as well.