The majority of reach trucks and forklifts are available with a lot of common security features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would almost always have dead-man petals. Moreover, some manufacturers are offering extra features like for example speed controls that could reduce the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous articles available on Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
A huge part of lift truck 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 business. Although they offer a good price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not offer the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you should be ready for significant aggravation when the forklift goes down. Each type of lift truck goes down eventually and parts, service and general questions should be addressed at some point.
Normally, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a huge supply of parts for the specific model and make you are buying. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop and take a look at their parts room so as to try to understand how many parts they stock. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the component you require, where will it come from? With any luck, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units presently used in your area. This is doubly vital for specialty trucks such as turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being used in their service area that you must assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. Additionally, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that particular model as well.