- This paper presents a novel application of artificial cognitive systems to traffic scene understanding and early recognition of highway maneuvers. This is achieved by use of Bayesian networks for knowledge representation, to mimic the human reasoning on situation analysis and to manage inherited uncertainties in the automotive domain, that requires efficient and effective analysis of high volume and frequency data streams. The maneuver recognition uses features, analyzing the observed vehicles behavior and available free space on the target lane. Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) capture the motion of the own and surrounding vehicles as a dynamic process, following the trend development of lateral motion features. The static and dynamic models for maneuver recognition are statistically evaluated with real highway driving data sequences. The DBN demonstrates earlier recognition (∼ 1.1 seconds) and higher accuracy (1.12% error rate) with more stable performance than the static models. The system is deployed on an experimental vehicle, where a Divide-and-conquer approach to inference in object-oriented Bayesian networks is introduced and its implementation is shown to require computation time of 0.15 milliseconds and ROM memory ∼ 10 2 kilobytes. The promising performance evaluation results are confirmed by test drives in real highway traffic.