Yes, **** can be swapped for **** without changing the meaning.
In the given context, they have the same meaning as "The car is only a car.", which implies "The car is only a car unlike your life. No matter how damaged it gets, it can be compensated by such as repairing it or replacing it with a new one."
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# EDIT
> ...are there instances where swapping is impossible?
Very few, but certainly there are.
There is a corpus named "" here, which collected a vast number of actual Japanese sentences. In this corpus, I searched for sentence examples with "" as a keyword, and I examined whether they can be replaced with "".
In many cases, I found they could be, but I found an example that couldn't be replaced with , which is shown below.
> ****
This sentence could be rewritten as: ****
_However, I believed that there was no one except Sakutaro whom I could depend on for the life of my old age._