It succeeds the Iveco 490 TurboCity UR Green urban bus, later replaced by the Irisbus Citelis.

The CityClass project was created in the 90s by the Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro[1] and was presented to the public in 1996 to replace the Iveco TurboCity.

In 2001 ALTRA, in collaboration with Ansaldo Ricerche, Sapio, International Fuel Cells, Exide, T_V and Centro Ricerche Fiat and with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Environment as well as Piedmont, developed a version with electric traction powered by hydrogen put into service in Turin on behalf of GTT, and also used for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

At the end of 1999, the Iveco logo on the CityClass grille was replaced by the Irisbus dolphin and will remain so, in Europe, until 2008.

The CityClass model, of which more than 7,000 units have been produced in Italy, is undoubtedly the most distributed urban bus in Europe.

The CityClass has also found wide outlets abroad: Switzerland, France, Germany, Romania, South Korea and above all Spain and Greece.

The Fiat group and its truck and bus division, Iveco, have paid attention to protecting the environment with cutting-edge research on consumption reduction, exhaust gas filtration, the first equipment of which dates back to 1980.

ATI was made up of six companies: GTT (former ATM - municipal authority for urban transport of the Piedmontese capital), Iveco (second largest bus manufacturer in the world), Sapio (one of the main Italian producers of technical and medical gases), CVA - Compagnia Valdostana delle Acque SpA (producer of renewable electricity), ENEA - Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente (Public Research Center for Innovation and Sustainable Development), Ansaldo Ricerche (Department of investigation of the Ansaldo group).

With the creation of Irisbus in 1999, Iveco launched an ambitious project on a hydrogen-powered city bus, a system called Fuel Cell.

After the approval of the prototype in Italy, these buses were delivered to urban transport companies in Turin, Barcelona and Germany (Munich) on November 1, 2004.