One can find a range of safety features that are common to particular types of trucks including seat belts on sit-down vehicles. On most stand-up vehicles there are dead-man petals also. Furthermore, some manufacturers are providing extra features like speed controls that could reduce the overall speed based on load height and steering angle. For more info, there are numerous available articles on Loading Dock Safety and Lift Truck Safety.
Service and Support
A big part of lift truck selection is to make certain that you maintain access to high levels of support and service. Every year, there seems to be a wider variety of new players in the lift truck industry. Although 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 need to be prepared for significant stress when the forklift breaks. Each model of lift truck goes down at some point and service, parts and general questions should be answered at some point.
Normally, 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 certain to visit the dealership or the repair shop and check their parts room in order to try to know how many parts they stock. Make certain to ask that if they do not have the component you need, where will it come from? With a bit of luck, the answer would be from a regional or local distribution facility.
Try to get some additional ideas on the units presently used in your area. This is doubly important for specialty trucks such as turret trucks. If there are only a small amount of trucks in use in their service area that you must assume they might not be stocking many if any parts for them. Furthermore, they could have very little overall experience in servicing that model too.