This Electric Café Racer Was Built For Only $250 In Parts

What happens when you park your electric dirt bike outside the local microbrewery? You come back to find it looking like this.

It’s often the vintage Honda modding scene that you see taking inspiration from the hallowed thumpers and twins once found at Ace Café in London, but this ultramodern café racer makes no noise and uses no gasoline. This polarizing Talaria Sting café racer was posted to the Facebook group Talaria Owners USA (Official) and reactions are decidedly mixed.

Customization consists of a Viper-style front fairing and LED headlight, white grips, a brown café seat, street tread tires, and a swooping rear fender tethered by a gold metal hoop. Underneath the beauty (?) is a standard Talaria Sting, a lot like the new ones we sell here on GritShift, a 127-pound e-bike capable of about 45 MPH in stock form.

Sick Homage or Ugly Duckling?

Those specs are certainly in keeping with the spirit of actual café racers, a subculture that originally revolved around small, light, nimble motorcycles hopping between cafés in London in the 1960s, but the jury’s out on whether this particular Sting pulls it off.

• Commenters pointed out that the fork angle looks way too steep and totally wrong. I think that’s just the angle of the photos, because modifying the fork angle on a Sting would be extremely complicated and dangerous.
• Commenters said the bike looks both awkwardly tall and awkwardly short at the same time. I can see how the long suspension and high ground clearance don’t mix well with how scrunched the seat/tank/fairing area is.
• One commenter said it would look better with a front fender. Fenderless might be fine on a track or some perfectly clean road somewhere, but in the real world you’re just going to get rock chips all over your fancy controller. Good thing the EBMX X9000 Controllers we carry for the Talaria Sting have swappable heatsink covers to protect the controller while adding some panache to your ride. Shameless plug indeed.
• On a conceptual level, a few people even brought into question the idea of customizing an off-road bike like the Talaria Sting in the on-road style of a café racer.

Most of our office thinks it’s cool, and I’m one of them. Besides changing the grips to brown and creating a trim piece to blend the front of the seat into the tank, I think it’s spot on.

In a world of supermotos and hard enduro builds, it’s pretty cool to see someone taking a Talaria in a totally different direction.

Talaria Sting Café Racer Parts List

If you’re looking to copy the café racer style for your own Talaria Sting, it’s actually more affordable than you might think.

• The nosepiece looks like this universal quarter fairing from eBay, and at the current sale price of $49.99, it looks like it’s pretty good bang for your buck considering you get a painted fairing, tinted windscreen, and headlight cover all in one unit.
• The headlight is this universal 6.5” LED halo headlight from AliExpress currently listed at $31.23 before shipping.
• The seat appears to be this universal café racer seat from Amazon that’s currently going for $88.00.
• There’s a frame hoop on the back, but I don’t think you’d need one since there’s no passenger seat. It’s likely there as a grab handle and for crash protection, but if you want it, it’s here on eBay for $24.98.
• The rear fender is likely this universal front motorcycle fender from Amazon that’s currently listed at $39.65.

This is how you can build your own Talaria Sting café racer for just under $250 in parts. A grand total of $233.85 seems like a small price to pay for a pretty unique bike, and since there’s just about zero fabrication required to make it happen, anyone could do it over the weekend. Just don’t have it in a million pieces in your living room when your roommate gets home. Trust me.

Although e-bikes like the Talaria Sting have rarely been looked at in this context, they do seem to fit pretty well as spiritual successors to the original café racers. And with the possibility that internal combustion may one day be banned from London entirely, could e-bikes like the Talaria Sting become the new café racers of the modern era? Only time will tell.