It's not so much the lens flare but the initial flare effect which I believe can be witnessed without looking through a camera. If you look at a street lamp at night you will notice a distinctive flare around the light source. I'm not sure what to call this effect though.

There's two overlapping effects around a street lamp at night.

One is a lens flare -- in your original picture of the car, the radial lines, doughnut-shaped rings and the central glow are a lens flare.

This part of the effect will fade/shrink as you raise your hand and cover the street lamp / light-bulb from your view.

After covering the street-lamp with your hand / thumb, the first glow will disappear (as it's occurring in your eye/lens), but the second one will remain. This is a large halo around the light (not really present in your first picture), caused by particles in the air scattering the light. On humid/misty nights, or in polluted areas, this effect will be more pronounced as there will be more of these scattering particles.

Ideally, this would be rendered as a volumetric halo, or a regular point light affecting a volumetric fog.

Could you mean halo?

And specifically, lenticular halo phenomena?

EDIT: From what I recall, there's not a whole lot of theory on the subject because there's actually some controversy as to what is actually taking place in our eyes, but I don't know if that's still the case. I *do* know there's another successor paper to the linked that actually generates animated halos by way of a super-detailed simulation that tries to account for small particles floating around in the vitreous humor, but sadly I can't locate it with some basic Google searching :(

It's real easy to create that effect in the real world. Squint your eyes, your eyelashes will cause it. If you wear glasses, wipe it with something with a little oil on it (your body oil on your shirt works fine), the streaks will be perpendicular to the direction of the wiping. A recently cleaned windshield that isn't fully clean will work just as good. It can be caused both by a fresnel effect and a reflection effect.

The physical name for the effect which accounts for at least the long streaks + the ring structure, is a diffraction pattern, caused by Fraunhofer diffraction as incident light waves diffract off the aperture of your eye system (i.e. glasses + contacts + eyebrows + cornea + any other foreign body such as dirt and whatnot) and bleed onto your retina.

I guess it probably goes by more trendy names in the photographic industry