Most reach trucks and forklifts come with many common safety features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would almost always have dead-man petals. Furthermore, certain manufacturers are providing extra features such as speed controls which could reduce the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more information, there are numerous available articles about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Service and Support
Making certain you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a really important part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players within the forklift industry each 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 must be prepared for major stress when the lift truck breaks. Each lift truck model goes down at some point and service, parts and general questions should 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 need for your particular model. Be sure to visit the repair shop or the dealership and check their parts room so as to try to know how many parts they store. Make sure to inquire 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.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units currently used within your area. This is doubly vital for specialty trucks such as turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you should assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Additionally, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that specific model too.