One can find a range of safety features that 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 as well. In addition, certain manufacturers are offering extra features like speed controls that could decrease the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are numerous available articles on Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.
Support and Service
A big part of lift truck selection is to make sure that you maintain access to high levels of service and support. Every year, there seems to be a wider array of new players within the lift truck industry. Although they provide a decent lift truck design and a good price, if they do not provide the regional or local service and support infrastructure, you need to be ready for significant stress when the lift truck goes down. Each and every lift truck model goes down at some point and parts, service and general questions should be answered at some point.
You will normally want to have a nearby repair shop or dealer with a complete supply of the components you require for your particular model. 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 part you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
In addition, try to get some ideas as to how many of those specific units are currently being used within your area. This is very important for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks being utilized 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 as well.