We have a requirement to provide a reference "database" for a list of car dealerships by state and the particular vintage cars that they sold.

What this would be is an entry point with a list of states... each state would contain the list of dealers...and each dealer would contain the small list of cars by serial number.

I am looking for an existing module that we could adapt.

I did this same task on a Joomla site, using a "Cookbook" module (Gary's Cookbook 2.x) and it came out remarkably well.

We tweaked it thusly:
We changed the categories to mean states

We changed the recipes to mean dealers

..and then used the ingredients area to list the cars in table form by serial number

Dealer Name
Dealer State
History (text area)
Individual Cars
Details (text area)
Notes (text area)

The XOOPS module Recette seems a stretch to be a candidate this time around...but we'll play with it and report back.

oh... the module must be Xoops-searchable.

Any creative ideas on this?

Thanks

There are any number of modules you might adapt for this. Check out some of the directory listings and links modules. You could even look at adapting smartSection (news and article management) or even perhaps Catads (small ads) if you want to offer the cars for sale.