Most forklifts and lift trucks are available with a lot of common safety features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would almost always have dead-man petals. Moreover, some manufacturers are providing extra features like for instance speed controls which could reduce the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are many available articles about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Service and Support
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of service and support is a hugely important part of forklift selection. There seem to be a range of new players in the forklift business each year. Although they provide a good price and a decent forklift design, if they do not offer the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you have to be ready for significant aggravation when the lift truck breaks. Every kind of lift truck goes down sooner or later and service, parts and general questions must be addressed at some point.
Usually, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a huge supply of parts for the specific make and model you are purchasing. Be certain to visit the repair shop or the dealership and take a look at their parts room in order to try to know how many parts they store. Make certain to inquire that if they do not have the part you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a regional or local distribution facility.
In addition, try to get some ideas as to how many of those specific models are currently being utilized within your vicinity. This is very important for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being used in their service area that you should assume they might not be stocking many if any parts for them. In addition, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that specific model too.