Be careful with car chargers in general. Power in a car is notoriously "dirty" it surges, fluctuates, etc. with changes in engine speed. Like the previous commenter stated, its especially a bad idea to have anything you care much about plugged in while starting the car.
Cheap-o charge "bricks" and to a lesser extent cables can cause damage to phones. Both to the charge port and to the charge or power circuits. Phones do a good job of keeping a lot of this cleaned up, to an extent they expect you to plug it into something ill-advised. Generally I see these problems arise in phones that are banged up, dirty, and they've been using the cheapest chargers they can find at gas stations and the internet.
As a rule, the two things to look for is on a usb cable, look for one that is apple certified, they're engineered and built to some level of quality standard and on the charge bricks be a little more picky. Choose a charge brick based its output rating being at LEAST what your original was 1.2A as a guideline. Look for one that has a UL stamp on it that again, shows that it was built to meet a set of standards.
The bricks are what I see damage devices more often than cables, a poorly engineered/built brick does not do a quality job controlling its output, I've seen cheap-os fluctuate as high as 8 volt output.
Bottom line is, no, you don't have to go shell out for Apple's own cables and bricks but don't be cheap either. Most of the options that are quality are not much less money than Apple's products in a retail store but especially with the cables, they tend to not break as quickly.
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