You will find a range of safety features that are common to certain types of trucks like seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals too. In addition, some manufacturers are providing more features such as speed controls which could decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous available articles about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
Making certain you would maintain access to high levels of service and support is a very essential part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players in the lift truck industry every year. Although they provide a nice price and a decent forklift design, if they do not offer the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you should be prepared for major aggravation when the lift truck goes down. Each kind of lift truck goes down eventually and service, parts and general questions should be answered at some point.
Usually, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a great supply of components for the particular model and make you are purchasing. 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 certain to ask that if they do not have the part you need, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a local or regional distribution facility.
In addition, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular units are currently being utilized in your area. This is really vital for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being used in their service area that you should assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Moreover, they could have very little overall experience in servicing that specific model too.