The majority of reach trucks and forklifts come with lots of common safety features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would normally have dead-man petals. Additionally, some manufacturers are providing more features like speed controls that can reduce the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous articles available about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock 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 in the forklift industry. Even if they provide a nice price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not provide the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you need to be ready for significant stress when the forklift breaks. Each lift truck model goes down at some point and parts, service and general questions must be addressed at some point.
Generally, you will want a local dealer or repair shop with a huge supply of parts for the particular model and make you are buying. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop and take a look at their parts room in order to try to understand how many parts they store. Make sure to inquire that if they do not have the component you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer would be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Moreover, try to get some ideas as to how many of those specific units are presently being utilized in your area. This is very important for specialty trucks including 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. Also, they could have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.