Early identification and interpretation of traffic maneuvers will become key elements of modern driver assistance systems. Currently, only simple traffic situations can be detected by using a decision tree (DT) procedure in most cases. Even though this approach is straightforward, it still requires an expert to build a different DT for every maneuver. Moreover, for complex driving behaviours such simple logic identification does not work. In the present work we develop a template (or pattern) matching (TM) algorithm for maneuver recognition in highway traffic with a particular focus on a cut-in maneuver. By using maneuver patterns we are able to consider scenarios of arbitrary complexity and make the identification procedure more systematic and with minimal man expert involvement. The key element of the proposed TM algorithm is the settlement of a distance measure. We use dynamic time warping (DTW) method for an optimal non-linear alignment between two sequences under certain restrictions. It enables a correct assignment of the same maneuver but having different dynamics (speed, aggressiveness, etc.), and is robust to data with missing values. We illustrate the proposed method by cut-in detection from real traffic data and compare it to the standard DT identification.