You will find a variety of safety features which are common to particular kinds of trucks such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals also. Additionally, some manufacturers are providing extra features such as speed controls which are able to decrease the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are numerous available articles on Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck 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. Each year, there seems to be a wider variety of new players within the forklift business. Even though they offer a nice 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 major aggravation when the forklift goes down. Every lift truck model goes down sooner or later and parts, service and general questions would probably need to be addressed at some point.
You will usually want to have a nearby repair shop or dealer with a complete supply of the components you need for your particular unit. Be sure to visit the repair shop or the dealership and check their parts room in order to try to understand how many parts they stock. Make certain to ask that if they do not have the component you need, 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 presently used in your area. This is doubly vital for specialty trucks like 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. As well, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.