The Nikon 1 series is pretty much built around electronic shutters. The basic J and S series of cameras do not even contain any mechanical shutter at all, you only have the electronic shutter option.
The downside of the electronic shutter is that not all the sensor is read at once. Rather, the sensor photosites exposures are started and stopped row for row, vertically. This process of starting and stopping the exposure, and then collecting the exposure data, can take around 1/10s to 1/100s, depending on the camera model.
The slower, the less useful the electronic shutter is, as you can risk rolling shutter effects, buildings appear to lean if you pan while photographing, for example.
Rolling shutter effects are not exclusive to digital cameras. Rather, they were present also with early film cameras. Here is a famous photo of a racing car taken in 1913 by Jacques Henri Lartigue using a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera:
The curtain shutter moves relatively slowly on this camera 100 years old camera, when compared with modern SLRs, which gives the distortion of the racing car. The distortion is especially visible in the wheels, which appear to be leaning forward. This rolling shutter effect was later copied by cartoonists when they wanted to give the impression of speed.
