The visibility level (VL), a quality index in road lighting design, also serves to assess automotive lighting performance. Unlike illuminance levels, the VL provides a link between lighting design and driving performance. The reference performance of the VL is the detection of a small uniform target, standing on a uniform background (the road surface). Still, VL is subject to a number of caveats with regards to the driving task. We address the non-realistic nature of the reference target (a uniform square). A driving simulation experiment was conducted in a virtual night-time rural highway environment. The subjects drove along the road and came across different targets on the roadside. The detection distances were recorded and compared with the corresponding VL, showing rather good agreement.