The majority of reach trucks and forklifts are available with many common safety features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles will usually have dead-man petals. Moreover, certain manufacturers are providing extra features like speed controls which are able to decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are many available articles about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
A big part of forklift selection is to make sure that you maintain access to high levels of support and service. Every year, there seems to be a wider variety of new players in the forklift industry. Although they provide a nice price and a decent forklift design, if they do not provide the regional or local support and service infrastructure, you should be prepared for significant aggravation when the lift truck goes down. Each type of lift truck goes down eventually and service, parts and general questions must be answered at some point.
You will normally want to have a nearby dealer or repair shop with a full supply of the parts you require for your specific unit. Be certain to visit the dealership or the repair shop and check their parts room in order to try to know how many parts they stock. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the component you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
In addition, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular models are presently being used within your area. This is very important for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being utilized in their service area that you must assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Moreover, they could have very little overall experience in servicing that model as well.