CCC report - That's the market value report put together by the insurance company's appraiser, right? I think my insurance company used them too. Your insurance co DOES owe you market value, but they're more or less right that it doesn't matter what you spent on the car. Sometimes what you spend on the car adds to market value, sometimes it does not.
There are two ways to dispute CCC's valuation - hire an appraiser to build your own valuation or take CCC's raw data and blow it apart, then replace it with new data. I'd suggest at least starting down the path of doing it yourself at least until you figure out if you have a case. At that point you can decide whether you have the time or prefer paying somebody to do it for you.
The CCC report will take 3-6 other LCs ostensibly in similar condition and use those to approximate the value of yours. So... Take each one of their comparable cars and see what you can find. With any luck you know somebody who has a CarFax account and they can run each one through a CarFax report and see what kind of history it had. Often the cars used in the comp are advertised on dealer websites, so search the VIN numbers and see if you can find the listings. From sources like these, collect photos and information about each comp and see if it fairly approximates your car.
In my case (and going from memory a couple years back), CCC gave me an initial value of 21K based on 3 comparable cars, but they included an additional 3 cars that were not used in the calculation, but supported their valuation. I ran the VIN for each of those 6 cars through a CarFax report and discovered that of the 6 cars, 4 had been in prior wrecks (mine had not) and one had an invalid VIN number - maybe a typo or maybe fraudulent. The last of the 6 cars had photos of extensive undercarriage rust on the dealer's website (mine was completely rust free). I then found several other LCs for sale around different dealers that had much higher asking prices and eventually was able to get the insurance company to increase the payout from 21K to 28.5K (both those then got grossed up for taxes).
An appraiser would do mostly the same type of work, but they might have more tools available to them (e.g., unlimited carfax reports, auction sales data, etc) or more experience of where to find good comps or what kind of adjustments to make.
They'll be very resistant, but most of the time they will come around to something reasonable if you give them realistic numbers. Do a lot of leg work, pull a ton of data, and be realistic.
As the prior post mentions, the more you convince them to agree on a higher value, the more likely it is that they will repair it instead of totaling it, and if they do total it, the more they will likely charge you if you want to buy the wreck and get it fixed yourself.
