The majority of reach trucks and forklifts are available with a lot of common security features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles will normally have dead-man petals. In addition, some manufacturers are providing extra features like for instance speed controls that could decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous articles available about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
Making sure you will maintain access to high levels of service and support is a really important part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players within the forklift business every year. Even though they provide a nice price and a decent lift truck design, if they do not offer the local or regional support and service infrastructure, you must be ready for significant aggravation when the forklift goes down. Each lift truck model goes down sooner or later and parts, service and general questions will probably need to be answered at some point.
Usually, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a great supply of parts for the particular model and make you are buying. 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 store. Make certain to inquire that if they do not have the part you need, where will it come from? Hopefully, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Moreover, try to get some ideas as to how many of those particular units are currently being utilized in your vicinity. 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 must 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 as well.