Have you heard the story about the hybrid car with batteries that had be replaced frequently and were expensive to buy?

Or the story about how extraordinarily expensive it is to repair a so-called hybrid car, which runs on electricity and gasoline?

Or maybe you've heard that hybrids are a far bigger safety risk to emergency workers than conventional cars because of all the electrical cables running through them.

Well, none of the above is really true, car experts say. But, they note, stories about high repair costs, technical problems and the lack of technicians to service the vehicles are to be expected as the popularity of such gas-friendly hybrid cars as the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius grows. "People are afraid of things they don't know much about," said Craig Van Batenburg, owner and chief instructor for the ACDC Automotive Career Development Center based in Worcester, Mass.

Batenburg trains about 3,000 technicians each year to work on hybrids, which rely on a combination of electrical and traditional combustion engine technology to work. He also has written a hybrid service manual for independent mechanics who are not associated with any dealers and who may be confused about the new technology and thus may advise potential buyers against buying one.

It's that lack of training, says the Web site hybridcars.com, that can cause some dealers to charge a little more for servicing a hybrid -- not in terms of hourly rates but in terms of time spent working on a car. But the Web site also notes that the most popular hybrids carry the same sort of warranties as do other cars, starting with 3 years/36,000 miles and up on the conventional parts and systems.

Both the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Accord, the two most popular hybrid cars, have been named best buys by Consumer Reports the past two years, respectively, with the Prius receiving an "excellent" reliability rating for the most recent year. While hybrid cars can cost thousands more than conventional counterparts, hybridcars.com notes that their resale value have been holding up, though the numbers for comparison are relatively small. Fewer than 50,000 were sold in the United States last year out of total domestic sales of 16.7 million.

As for all the stories about risky hybrids, Van Batenburg blames ignorance. He noted, for example, that a wire service ran a story saying that orange high voltage cables that ran through the doors of hybrid cars could result in electrocution if they were cut. The wire service had "to run a correction because the cables don't run through the doors at all, they run under the car in a safe place."

In the Prius, for example, Toyota says the high voltage cables are located away from areas that workers might access, are painted orange, are shrouded in metal and have specific automatic disablement mechanisms to ensure the lines have no voltage if an accident occurs. In the Honda, the cable runs down the center line of the vehicles to protect it in the case of accidents, a spokesman said.

The criticism about the cost and reliability of batteries reflects some misconceptions, Van Batenburg and hybridcars.com said. The battery packs that are used in hybrid systems do use a material called nickel metal hydride that's also used to power cell phones and video recorders.

But while some of those smaller battery packs may have stopped working and required recharging because they got to hot, were dropped or misused in some other fashion, it would be difficult for the same thing to happen to battery packs in cars, Van Batenburg said.

Battery packs in hybrid cars "are prevented from overheating by the use of cooling fans and sensors that are inside the battery packs themselves. There's a computer involved whose sole job is to take good care of the battery," Van Batenburg said.

A Toyota spokesman said the Prius battery is designed to last 180,000 miles with no deterioration, aided by a battery-power management system designed to keep the battery at an optimum charge level that never fully drains or recharges it..

Van Batenburg owns a Honda Insight, another hybrid model, and after 65,000 miles of driving, "the battery is absolutely perfect. It's like new." He also noted that it's covered by an 8-year, 80,000-mile warranty.