Most reach trucks and forklifts are available with lots of common security features, including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles would usually have dead-man petals. In addition, certain manufacturers are providing more features like speed controls that can decrease the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more information, there are many articles available about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
Making certain you will maintain access to high levels of support and service is a really important part of lift truck selection. There seem to be a variety of new players in the forklift business every year. Although they provide a good price and a decent forklift design, if they do not offer the local or regional service and support infrastructure, you have to be ready for significant stress when the lift truck breaks. Each kind of lift truck goes down sooner or later and service, parts and general questions would probably need to be answered at some point.
You would generally want to have a nearby repair shop or dealer with a complete supply of the parts you need for your particular unit. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop and take a look at 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 any luck, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units currently used in your vicinity. This is doubly essential for specialty trucks like turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you should assume they might not be stocking many if any parts for them. Also, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.