The majority of forklifts and lift trucks come with many common safety features, like seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles will usually have dead-man petals. In addition, certain manufacturers are offering more features such as speed controls that could 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
Making sure you would maintain access to high levels of support and service is a really essential part of forklift selection. There seem to be a variety of new players in the forklift business each year. Even if they offer a nice price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not provide the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you should be ready for significant aggravation when the lift truck breaks. Each kind of lift truck goes down at some point and service, parts and general questions must be answered at some point.
You will usually want to have a nearby repair shop or dealer with a complete supply of the parts you need for your specific unit. Be sure to visit the repair shop or the dealership and check their parts room in order to try to know how many parts they store. Make sure to ask that if they do not have the part you require, where will it come from? With a bit of luck, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Additionally, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular models are presently being used within your area. This is really 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. What's more, they may have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.