The majority of forklifts and lift trucks are available with lots of common safety features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would almost always have dead-man petals. Moreover, certain manufacturers are offering extra features like speed controls that could reduce the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more information, there are many available articles about Lift Truck Safety and Loading Dock Safety.

Support and Service
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a very vital part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players within the lift truck industry every year. Even though they offer a decent lift truck design and a nice price, if they do not offer the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you must be prepared for significant stress when the lift truck goes down. Every model of lift truck goes down sooner or later and service, parts and general questions must be addressed at some point.

You will normally want to have a nearby dealer or repair shop with a full supply of the components you need for your specific unit. Be certain to visit the repair shop or the dealership and take a look at their parts room so as to try to know how many parts they store. Make certain to ask that if they do not have the component you require, where would it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.

Additionally, 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 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. In addition, they could have very little overall experience in servicing that specific model too.