The majority of forklifts and lift trucks are available with many common safety features, such as seat belts on sit-down vehicles. Stand-up vehicles will normally have dead-man petals. Furthermore, some manufacturers are providing extra features like for example speed controls that could decrease the overall speed based on steering angle and load height. For more information, there are numerous available articles about Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Support and Service
A big part of lift truck selection is to make sure that you maintain access to high levels of service and support. Each and every year, there seems to be a wider variety of new players in the lift truck business. Although they offer a decent lift truck design and a good price, if they do not provide the regional or local support and service infrastructure, you need to be ready for significant stress when the forklift breaks. Every type of lift truck goes down at some point and service, parts and general questions will probably need to be answered at some point.
Generally, you would want a local repair shop or dealer with a huge supply of components for the specific model and make you are purchasing. Be sure to visit the dealership or the repair shop and check their parts room so as to try to understand how many parts they stock. Make sure to inquire that if they do not have the component you require, where will it come from? With any luck, the answer will be from a local or regional distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the models presently used in your vicinity. This is doubly vital for specialty trucks such as 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. What's more, they can have very little overall experience in servicing that model as well.