Magento - Year, Make and Model Tire Filtering Tool

I run a tire website. I currently have no solution for my customers to be able to look up tires that fit their vehicle by year, make, and model. I would like a custom solution created where customers can begin their shopping experience by selecting their vehicle information to narrow the results OR if they are already in a particular product category, they can narrow the results by selecting their year/make/model. This tool MUST have conditional requirements built in, meaning someone cannot select Make without first selecting Year. They must select Year first (having other options greyed out so they cannot be selected). Once they select the Year, then the Make drop down becomes available according to the Makes that match the year selected. Once they select Make, then the model drop down will be available and the options will be only those models that match both the year and make selected and so on. Brand can be available and selected at any time. I would imagine this would require some database table that marries to our current Magento product tables, so products can be associated with Year, Make, and Model. This tool must be FAST. It cannot take 30 seconds for the Makes to show up once a Year has been selected. It must be as close to instant as possible. Additionally, I see this being a nested module on the left nav of our template for the main tool, with drop down boxes stacked one on top of the other with a "SEARCH" button once they have selected their variables. I also see this being a horizontal tool on all Magento Category and Brand pages that will function in much the same manner as the conditional drop downs based on selecting Year first, then Make, then Model. I welcome any and all creativity for finding the optimal solution. It must be a FAST tool. It must be easy for us to upload and apply year, make, model requirements on a SKU by SKU basis either through CSV or through an upload process directly through MySQL. For an example, please visit: [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL]