You will find a variety of safety features which are common to particular types of trucks including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals also. In addition, certain manufacturers are providing extra features like for instance speed controls which can reduce the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are many available articles on Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
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 variety of new players in the lift truck business. Even though they offer a nice price and a decent forklift design, if they do not provide the regional or local support and service infrastructure, you should be ready for significant aggravation when the forklift goes down. Every model of lift truck goes down at some point and parts, service and general questions should be answered at some point.
Generally, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a huge supply of parts for the specific model and make you are buying. Be sure to visit the repair shop or the dealership and take a look at their parts room in order to try to understand how many parts they store. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the component you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units currently used in your area. This is doubly essential 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 specific model too.