There are a variety of safety features which are common to certain kinds of trucks including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals also. In addition, some manufacturers are offering more features like speed controls which can reduce the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are many available articles about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a really vital part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a range of new players within the lift truck business each year. Although they offer a decent lift truck design and a good price, if they do not offer the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you need to be prepared for major aggravation when the forklift breaks. Each lift truck model goes down eventually and service, parts and general questions should be addressed at some point.
You will normally want to have a nearby dealer or repair shop with a full supply of the parts you need for your specific model. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop 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 part you require, where will it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Moreover, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular models are currently being used within your vicinity. This is very important for specialty trucks including turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you must assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Furthermore, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that particular model too.