Most reach trucks and forklifts are available with lots of common safety features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would normally have dead-man petals. In addition, some manufacturers are offering more features like speed controls which could decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more information, there are many articles available about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Support and Service
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a hugely important part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a range of new players in the lift truck business each and every year. Even if they provide a nice price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not offer the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you must be prepared for significant aggravation when the forklift breaks. Every lift truck model goes down eventually and service, parts and general questions should be addressed at some point.
Usually, you will 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 check their parts room so as to try to understand how many parts they stock. Make certain to ask that if they do not have the part you require, where will it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units presently utilized within your area. This is doubly important for specialty trucks like 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. Additionally, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.