You will find a variety of safety features that are common to particular kinds of trucks like seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals also. Additionally, some manufacturers are providing extra features like for instance speed controls that could decrease the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are many articles available on Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
Making sure you would maintain access to high levels of service and support is a really essential part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players within the lift truck business each and every year. Even if they offer a good price and a decent forklift design, if they do not provide the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you need to be prepared for significant stress when the lift truck goes down. Each lift truck model goes down at some point and service, parts and general questions must be answered at some point.
You will generally want to have a nearby repair shop or dealer with a complete supply of the parts you require for your specific unit. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop and check their parts room so as to try to understand how many parts they store. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the component you need, where will it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the models currently utilized 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 must assume they may not be stocking many if any parts for them. As well, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.