Most reach trucks and forklifts come with a lot of common safety features, like seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would normally have dead-man petals. In addition, certain manufacturers are providing extra features like speed controls that can decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous articles available about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a hugely important part of forklift selection. There seem to be a range of new players in the lift truck industry each and every year. Even if they provide a decent lift truck design and a nice price, if they do not offer the regional or local service and support infrastructure, you have to be prepared for major stress when the lift truck goes down. Each and every lift truck model goes down eventually and parts, service and general questions must be answered at some point.
You will normally want to have a nearby dealer or repair shop with a complete supply of the parts you need for your particular unit. Be certain to visit the dealership or the repair shop and take a look at their parts room in order to try to know how many parts they store. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the part you need, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Furthermore, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular units are presently being used in your vicinity. This is really vital for specialty trucks including turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being used in their service area that you must assume they might not be stocking many if any parts for them. In addition, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.